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penis), activity (e.g., eating), idea (e.g., patriotism) or feeling (e.g., hate) by a concrete object (penis by a tower). Here, the process of ‘symbolism’ displays, among others, the following characteristics: 1.While the symbol is conscious, it stands for something else that is often unconscious; 2. The symbol may be concrete, but the symbolized may be concrete or abstract; 3. The formation of a symbol is dependent on partial equation with the symbolized, in accordance with primary process thinking; 4. There exists a ‘constant relation’ between a symbol and its unconscious equivalent; 5. While dreams manifest the work of symbolism most clearly, neurotic symptoms and creativity also rely heavily upon this mechanism (Akhtar 2009, p. 279). From within the synthetic post-Bionian/post-Freudian North American Object Relations perspective, symbolism per se is defined as “…a statement of the transformation of an object from a sensuous or perceptual status to a conceptual one where the idea of the object exists without the sensate object per se ” (Grotstein 1977, p. 415). With the growing multidisciplinary study and knowledge of the earliest preverbal period of development, there is a recognition of the importance for all experiential systems— 1. the nonverbal nonsymbolized, preverbal presymbolized or traumatically de-/un-symbolized (implicit, procedural nonconscious, the inchoate, posttraumatic ‘zero process’, visceral physical/somatic and affecto-motor expressions and processes’); 2. the nonverbal symbolized (psychoanalytic symbolism of the primary process), and 3. the verbal symbolized (communicative symbolism of the secondary process; language with its individualized denotative-lexical, prosodic, and connotative-affective/sensorial individualized features), and their intermediary formations and interconnections to be meaningfully attended to in the psychoanalytic discourse (Brunet and Cassoni 1996; Bucci 2003; Fernando 2010; Papiasvili 2016). This contemporary trend will be further elucidated in the North American and interdisciplinary sections. Among European dictionaries and encyclopedia s, “Language of Psychoanalysis” by Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.B. (1973) states that symbolism broadly speaking ‘is a mode of indirect and figurative representation of an unconscious idea, conflict or wish. However, in a more restricted sense it refers to a mode of representation distinguished via a constant relationship between the symbol and what is being symbolized in the unconscious. Furthermore, this constant relationship will be found in individuals of varied cultures, as well as in myths, folklore, religion and language. The word itself comes from the Greek word symbolon , an object, usually a clay tablet, which when broken in two, each half was retained by two people or two sides. Thus, it represented a sign or pact during periods of absence which when reunited and brought together became a sign of recognition of their relationship. It is therefore the link between two objects that creates its meaning, wherein the symbol and the symbolized are not the same. This also implies a recognition of separateness between the object and subject (Klein 1930; Segal 1957). Skelton’s (2006) “The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis” defines symbolization broadly as ‘Meaning making as in art and creativity.’ In psychoanalysis
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