Symbolization

Representation and Communication

James Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429919633
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book traces the development of the understanding of symbols and their formation and use in its historical context, and discusses their clinical significance in psychoanalysis. It will be of relevance and use in the practical sense as well as the theoretical.

CHAPTER ONE

Symbols: on their formation and use

James Rose

Introduction

Because psychoanalysis is a science of subjectivity, it is no surprise that symbols and symbolic phenomena have been of central interest from its inception and early development. There are few phenomena more obviously subjective than symbols. They conjure a particular fascination because of their enigmatic quality. For this reason, they manage to communicate something in an obscure manner. Thus, they partly hide. This duality and ambiguity approaches the fleeting and evanescent quality of subjectivity itself, at its most subjective. The word symbol is derived from the Greek symbolon, which denoted an object cut in two, constituting a sign of recognition when those who carry it (them) can assemble the two pieces. It was used by members of the early Christian church during times of persecution when it could be fatally dangerous to announce one’s faith without ensuring the identity of those to whom one spoke.

Thinking about symbols in this descriptive way introduces us to their complexity. However, it is not the most immediately helpful approach to understanding symbols as phenomena, because it omits immediate consideration of how symbols are formed and how they are used by the individual and the groups that seem to gather around them. The essence of a symbol is that it has a meaning for someone. It is this that distinguishes a symbol from a sign, which is usually taken to mean a stimulus for some kind of action. This action is not necessarily mediated in any way by conscious thought. A danger sign is a prompt to escape the danger without any pause for thoughtful reflection. Pavlov’s dogs formed associative links between the ringing of a bell and salivation, which were termed conditioned reflexes. These links, however, did not create symbols because the “symbolizer” had no conscious choice in how to respond on presentation of the sign. Thus, the bell does not become the symbol of meat to the dog.

This simple division between symbol and sign based on the possibility of choice and thought does not quite stand up to the test of experience when we hear a fire alarm. Whether we waste no time to escape the building probably depends on other cues besides the alarm bell itself. The smell of smoke and the sound of running feet and alarmed voices will no doubt influence how we interpret the danger. If we suggest that a sign stands for action whereas a symbol represents an experience, then I think we get to something more useful, particularly if we add that the experience itself may only be partly open to consciousness. It is this that makes the symbol of interest to students of subjectivity.

Initially, the promise of symbols to the pioneers of psychoanalysis was based on their offering access to the unconscious. Like dreams—and manifest in dreams—they seemed to promise to be part of the “royal road to the unconscious”.

An example comes from Joan Riviere (1924) who reported in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis that:

Speaking of homo-sexuality between women for the first time in analysis, a woman patient expressed disgust at such a practice. On being asked the origin of this feeling, she said: “Well, it’s not so much disgusting, perhaps, as boring. I mean it seems such a pointless idea, so utterly meaningless—like trying to play tennis without balls!” The next moment she herself laughed at the quite unconscious significance of what she had said. [p. 85]

The development of the concept of symbolism in psychoanalytic theory

Freudian psychoanalysts have differed from their Jungian counterparts in their regard for symbols because they have been increasingly narrowing their focus on to individual experience. The idea that symbols might have some cultural relevance, giving access to a collective unconscious, is of little interest to many of the Freudian persuasion, be they classical Freudian or followers of one of the post-Freudian pioneers. Exceptions might be thought to be the Lacanian development, with its development of the concept of the symbolic order as distinct from the real, and the imaginary orders and the work of Winnicott and associates (e.g., Milner), who have sought to show that artistic endeavour could be understood through the concept of transitional space and transitional phenomena.

In recent years, symbols as phenomena have not captured the imagination of the psychoanalytic community in quite the way they once did. The last symposium at an IPA congress on symbol formation was in 1978, to which Harold Blum and Hanna Segal contributed. At the IPA congress in Chile in 2000 there was a contribution to a panel on “Affect, somatization and symbolization”, notably by Joyce McDougall. Why there has been a comparative silence in the literature since is not easy to gauge. It hardly seems that all there was to be said about the symbol had been said. Perhaps it was the Lacanian claim for the symbolic order that had something to do with it. At the symposium in Jerusalem in 1978, Harold Blum stated quite categorically that the unconscious was not structured like a language as if it were an objective fact rather than a way of thinking about the unconscious.

Over the past century, development of the concept of symbolism has taken place within the different meta-psychological frameworks as they have emerged. Jones’ paper “On symbolism”, written in 1915 as a public lecture, was an effort to emphasize the significance of symbols as providing evidence for clearly unconscious processes. At the time this had an obviously political significance because the Freudian ideas were competing with the Jungian ones. The British Psychoanalytical Society had only just been formed and the establishment of the unconscious as something of scientific interest and a legitimate object of serious scientific research could not be taken for granted. Jones was battling not just for an acceptance of Freud’s ideas but also to raise the status of psychoanalysis to one of a science and a method of legitimate psychological inquiry.

However, Jones saw symbols as rather primitive, demonstrating a poverty or deficiency in a capacity to communicate. Nevertheless, he saw them providing evidence for the existence of unconscious process.

If the interest in symbols to psychoanalysts in the early part of the last century was because they provided evidence for unconscious process, the reason for their being of interest had changed by the middle of the century. In this country, the Controversial Discussions (see King & Steiner, 1992), prompted by the arrival of Viennese psychoanalysts into a British Psychoanalytical Society heavily influenced by Melanie Klein, created a tension because the protagonists used different models of subjectivity often without realizing it. At its most fundamental, the issue that divided British psychoanalysis was the philosophical one of how we can know reality in the sense of its objectivity. Freud believed that we can never know reality in a totally objective sense.

Freud (1915) held that:

In psychoanalysis there is no choice for us but to assert that mental processes are in themselves unconscious, and to liken the perception of them by means of consciousness to the perception of the external world by means of the sense organs.

And further that,

Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical to what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to be. [ibid.]

If we accept that our perception of reality must be a creation partly determined by unconscious processes and born from our desires, of which we are only partly aware, then we must accept that we cannot fully grasp the external world. This is Freud’s radical proposition, which challenged and continues to challenge our illusion that we are essentially rational beings. Klein’s concept of “unconscious phantasy” led some to believe that it was possible and technically important to interpret in the transference a patient’s hostile impulses towards the analyst. This they did much sooner than a classically trained psychoanalyst, who would wait until it was clear that such hostility was interfering with the free associative process.

As mentioned above, thinking in this descriptive way is not the most immediately helpful approach to understanding symbols as phenomena, because it omits immediate consideration of how symbols are formed and how they are used by the individual and the groups that seem to gather around them. Initially, the promise of symbols to the pioneers of psychoanalysis was based on their offering an access to the unconscious.

As Blum (1978) remarked in his summary of the colloquium on symbol formation at the IPA Congress in Jerusalem in 1976, there has been a tendency to concentrate on what symbols might mean rather what created them in the first place and what their function might be. Thus he said:

The whole subject of symbolism remains of great importance and a central topic for psychoanalysis, but has received infrequent systematic study (Donadeo, 1974). While there is much in the literature on the meaning of various symbols, there is little theoretical discussion of the symbolic process and symbol formation, and considerations of the different symbolic forms and products. It is now common knowledge, even for the layman that a train can represent a penis and a tunnel, a vagina, but the how and why of symbolism has been relegated to scattered articles in the psychoanalytic literature. [p. 455]

Without fully understanding its implications, most psychoanalysts have used an essentially Cartesian concept of subjectivity (see Cavell, 1998). As Cavell has pointed out, this concept can be characterized as “the first person view”. The problem with this position is how one introduces a notion of objectivity. As a beginning in thinking about how different analysts have addressed this problem (often, I think, without quite realizing what they were doing or why they needed to do it), we may say that one group of British analysts adopted an essentially neo-Platonic model. Another sought to resolve this difficulty by adopting a developmental benchmark based on the irreversible process of chronological time reflected by the fact that we all grow up and that children do not have the same cognitive or emotional capacities as adults. That is because they are developing them, and how each individual develops them in part determines their subjective experience as adults. As a result of this bifurcation in direction, it sometimes seems as if one group of British psychoanalysts sought to conquer the unconscious whereas another sought to re-establish it and make it available to be used. When reading Milner and, to a certain extent, Rycroft, one is reminded of the railings of William Blake against “Urizen”, otherwise known as Isaac Newton, the apotheosis of the rationalism of the enlightenment.

This creates a dilemma which some solved by insisting on psychoanalysis having solely a subjective focus. Others have found this too solipsistic for their taste, and from this difference flow a host of theoretical and practical consequences that are manifest—to give one example—in questions to do with how we can know what is important about an individual’s history in determining their subjective experience. Indeed, this extends to whether, and if so, how, we can know the reality of anyone’s history in the sense of it being possible to discover the objective facts. There are those who say that this can only be discovered by the analysis of the transference as revealed in the psychoanalytic setting defined in the consulting room. Immediately, in these debates, one can see an inevitable dialectic between subjective and objective, but with a whole new twist on the notion of the objective brought about by the fact that in psychoanalysis we are dealing with the ideographic: that is, the nature of individual experience.

The confrontation with these scientific, methodological and essentially philosophical issues about subjectivity meant that the idea of symbols having an explanatory relevance beyond the understanding of the individual became increasingly problematical. We can note that the various seminal papers published since the 1950s have a common feature in that they seek to use symbolic phenomena as providing evidence for a particular metapsychological position. If we look at the papers published during the 1950s; e.g., Milner (1952), Rycroft (1956), Segal (1957), and Winnicott (1951), we can see a divergence not only of theoretical opinion but also in that of objective. It is as though one group of writers, Klein (1930) and Segal (1957), were seeking to bring primary processes under control whereas others were trying to unfetter them. It is interesting to find both Milner and Segal describing, and using the terms, symbolic equations and symbolic representations, but with a quite different outlook in mind.

Thus, these papers reflect the development of metapsychology in this period and the interesting thing is that they all have something useful to say, both theoretically and practically. The practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist will find something useful in all of them, regardless of the reader’s theoretical predilection. However, the possibility that any of these papers provides the crucial or essentially distinguishing clue to resolving philosophical issues to do with subjectivity and objectivity and their relationship still seems to elude us.

This probably should be unsurprising. If the unconscious does not give up its secrets easily, we can be sure that metaphysical questions and their metapsychological counterparts will prove equally redoubtable. What makes the study of symbolism and its history interesting is that symbols provide clues to understanding what is obscure—such as a symptom—and the manner of their formation and usage can tell us something important about how and why we can—or fail to—communicate with one another. But, we can go beyond that, in so far as the study of the formation of a symbol can provide a line of approach to the question of how we create our subjectivity. Put in other words, how we create a sense of ourselves and its attendant sense of reality. When applied to the study of an individual’s subjective experience, the unique property of the psychoanalytic setting permits the possibility of observing over a period of time how that individual creates his or her sense of the world and the people in it. We see it in the relationship with the psychoanalyst as it gathers and develops in the transference.

This is supposed to be a short book that provides a way into the understanding of the issues I have referred to above. The reader will have already realized that many issues are raised by a study of symbolism. Like the study of language, it is impossible to conduct this study outside the context of its expression. As Chomsky has suggested, the study of signifiers outside their context does not reveal much. For this reason, he did not consider that de Saussure had much of interest to say about linguistics—a position perhaps astonishing to some. A short book cannot be a thoroughly exhaustive text covering all the essential matters in all their aspects. This book is therefore assembled in such a way that the reader can trace the development of the understanding of symbols and their formation and use in its historical context, and to try to look at their clinical significance. This is in the hope that the book will be of relevance and use in the practical sense as well as the theoretical.

To do this, I found it useful to think about two issues. The first concerned what might force an individual subject to use symbols as means of communication. I became interested in the possibility that symbols are developed as part of the means of managing the inevitable and unavoidable anxiety of change. Change—or its prospect—is itself equally unavoidable because we cannot know the future. Thus, I have looked at the development of symbols as a means of communication through the use of the setting. This permitted a development of the concept of triangulation referred to by Marcia Cavell (1998), which is reprinted in full in this volume. The basic idea of this concept is that we can only know our own minds through discourse with another mind about something external to both those minds.

As a theoretical concept, triangulation as described by Cavell is an invaluable means of bringing together the subjective with the objective. The only drawback to its full application to the clinical setting is, to my mind, the absence of a temporal dimension. By adding a temporal dimension, we can postulate the idea of progressive triangulation because the essence of the psychoanalytic treatment is that its iterative nature allows a re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor
• Chapter One Symbols: on their formation and use
• Chapter Two A connection between a symbol and a symptom
• Chapter Three Triangulation, one’s own mind and objectivity
• Chapter Four Symbols and their function in managing the anxiety of change: an intersubjective approach
• Chapter Five A psychoanalytic approach to perception
• Chapter Six A clinical paradox of absence in the transference: how some patients create a virtual object to communicate an experience
• Chapter Seven Observing patients’ use of the psychoanalytic setting to communicate an experience of absence: the work of progressive triangulation
• Chapter Eight Some conclusions
• Bibliography by Subject
• Index