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of Symbolism” (above). Melanie Klein takes Jones’ ideas further when in 1923, considers symbolism to be the foundation of all sublimation and talent. In her work “The Role of the School in the Libidinal Development of the Child,” Klein (1923a) provides an approach to the concept of symbolization by examining its presence in writing—how letters and strokes carry symbolic meaning. She asserts that the symbolic character of images is active in all children’s fantasies. Thus, different traits and dots in our writing system might just be simplifications resulting from condensation, displacement, and other mechanisms that become familiar in dreams and in neuroses. Later, Klein (1930) proposes that all mental production has symbolic meaning. There is no randomness, nothing arbitrary in the human mind. Hanna Segal (1957) in her “Notes on Symbol Formation,” develops further the concept of symbolic equation , in which there is no distinction between the symbol and the object, which is regarded as the origin of schizophrenic concrete thinking. She also considers that symbols are necessary to displace aggression from the original object, thereby reducing guilt and the fear of loss. She furthers the proposition that symbols are necessary for communication both with the external and the internal worlds, since all communication is necessarily undertaken through symbols. Overall, for the construction of a representation, the capacity to symbolize proves essential, and the Kleinian approach made an undisputable contribution that enrich the concept and its further development. V. Aab. A divergent Perspective on Klein’s and Jones’ symbolization paradigms Carlo Maffi’s (2005, 2012) broad investigation of the history of ideas and the epistemology of psychoanalysis starts from the principle of a fundamental epistemic shift (much broader than psychoanalysis itself) between two opposing but consecutive paradigms: The first has Darwinian biology as its pilot science and was prevalent in all sciences in the Western world between approximately the second half of the 19th century and 1930. This ‘biologistic epistemology’ is the one to which Freud subscribed until the end of his life. The second paradigm has as its pilot science linguistics, communication theories, and semiotics, and it draws inspiration from many authors, mainly the work of De Saussure, E. Cassirer, Charles Morris, Charles Sanders Peirce, and others, and can be identified as "semiotic epistemology.". This is the one which is commensurate with Melanie Klein’s position on symbol formation and representation. Maffi does not believe there is a continuity between the Freudian and the Kleinian position regarding the symbol. In his view, the differences between the two positions are very clear: For the Freudian group, including Jones, the symbol is a type of primitive thought (it confuses things that should be kept separate), which is a product of repression (i.e., a pathological process), it therefore belongs to the repressed unconscious, and its content is strictly sexual. For the Kleinian group, the symbol is part of an evolved and fundamental process of the mind, it is part of secondary and reparative processes, of sublimation, and other elaborative processes (e.g., Dick is diagnosed as psychotic because his process of symbol formation had stopped).
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