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IV. OTHER EARLY AUTHORS
Ernest Jones As early as in 1910, in his correspondence with Freud, Jones (1910) refers to dreams as symbolic representations of the ‘hidden’ unconscious wishes, concealed by the primary process mechanisms. In his “Theory of Symbolism”, Jones (1912/1948) described how symbols may metaphorically/indirectly represent drive derivatives and/or conflicts involving repressed/forbidden wishes. In his view, the psychoanalytic symbols represent unconscious ideas linked to affective experience. Jones here explores the idea of the distinction between symbols and indirect representations, which would be a representation of something concrete, directly visible, and which, to achieve this aim, may use symbols, metaphors, and analogies to convey ideas, concepts, or emotions without presenting the tangible object. Jones develops the concept of symbolization and asserts: 1) The entire process of symbolization is unconscious 2) All symbols represent an idea of the “self” 3) Only that which is repressed needs to be symbolized He further states that the baby’s first impulses which initially seek to be symbolized are the bodies of its parents and its own body, organs, and functions . For him, the principle of pleasure makes it possible for two very different things to be equated based on a similarity rooted in pleasure or interest. In 1924, together with Karl Abraham (Jones and Abraham 1924), Jones eloquently reports on Theodore Reik ’s “Story in Genesis of the Creation of Woman”, exemplifying layering of unconscious representational processes, their secondary elaborations, distortions and psychic re-working accrued over many generations. While in many ways, it is an elaboration of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) and “Totem and Tabu” (1913), it can also be viewed as a precursor of later Freud’s writings on social anthropology, mythology and history of religion, e.g., “Civilization and its discontents” (1930) and “Moses and Monotheism” (Freud 1939). Generalizing with the respect to complex representational processes, Reik, Jones, and Abraham conclude: “Numerous analogous processes in the making of legends can be cited showing that the legend of the transformation of the rib into the woman is the primitive form, analogous to the mode of representation in dreams, and the only form in which the sequence of the ritual of puberty (castration) and marriage could be expressed in a myth. Subsequent narrators of the story no longer understood this mode of representation, since even the original meaning of circumcision had been relegated to the unconscious. So, it came about that in their secondary elaboration they gave this representation the semblance of a real, and not merely logical, connection, and this concealed the latent
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