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In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud 1920), Freud described his 18 months-old grandson's game with the cotton-reel as example of an early symbolic expression and an attempt at mastery of a complex psychic state. This (proto)symbolic play-enactment of the disappearance and return of the child’s mother occurred in early stages in the development of language, of mental representations and of symbolic activity, which all worked together to enable the child to express something of his inner world in a form that conveyed meaning and could be understood by those who knew him. Specifically, Freud (1920, pp. 14–17) described a game in which the infant held a wooden reel by a string and threw it over the edge of his curtained cot so that it disappeared into it, 'at the same time uttering his expressive "o-o-o-o" (representing “fort”) [“gone”]. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful " da " ["there"]. This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return.' Freud further observed in a very early study relating the mirror to self–object differentiation and identity formation, that the little boy also applied the game to himself. He could make himself disappear and reappear in the mirror as in the verbal equivalent of 'baby gone', representing his controlled loss of his mirror image. The complexity of Freud's observations and ideas related to the 'game' of the infant is possible to view as a description of three interrelated forms of infant play at 18 months of age: play with a toy, play with mirror images, and phonetic play with sounds which Freud recognized as antithetical linguistic symbols. In this view, Freud’s remarks on the symbolic mirror play prefigure the concepts of identity and individuation in the context of infantile narcissism and object relations. Inferring different symbolic and representational processes, Blum states: “The mother is not consciously symbolized in the toy game, but the toy may be considered a symbol for the mother consistent with the evolution of symbolic play during separation-individuation. The symbol itself becomes a substitute mental 'presence', for what is repressed. The dualistic antithesis of presence and absence, which Freud delineated, also can be viewed as referring both to the primary object and to the self in the triple play with the toy, the mirror, and words” (Blum 1978, pp. 462-463). Not unrelated, later theorists (Neubauer, 1987, 1990, 2000; Piaget 1936; Lacan 1966; Winnicott 1953; Modell 1970) in various ways conceptualized examples of the kind of understanding and communication that under optimal circumstances develop between a mother and child to facilitate the symbolic representation and later verbalization of complex inner states. Though Freud (1900, p. 352-353) allowed for personal use of dream symbols, in his “Dreams and Telepathy” (Freud 1922) he again stressed that the symbolism of fantasy is essentially universal without convention or socially defined regulation: “The language of symbolism, as you are aware, knows no grammar; it is an extreme case of a language of infinitives, and even the active and passive are represented by one and the same image” (Freud 1922, p. 212). The ambiguity and overdetermination of unconscious symbolism indicate that symbols and symbolic interpretation can have multiple meanings.
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