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dreams, the dream work is not a symbolic creation itself; the symbols used in dreams come from what is inherited. Later in life, in “Moses and Monotheism”, he writes: “There is… the universality of symbolism in language. The symbolic representation of one object by another –the same thing applies to actions– is familiar to all our children and comes to them, as it were, as a matter of course. We cannot show regard to them, how they have learned it, and must admit that in many cases, learning it is impossible. It is a question of an original knowledge which adults afterwards forget.” (Freud, 1939, p. 98). In these lines, Freud articuates his thesis about the inherited nature of symbols and their main expression through language.
II. Aac. Primary and Secondary Process Symbolism in Freud (Traditional and Recent North American Perspectives)
While Freud allowed for transition between primary and secondary process and, therefore, for transitional symbolic processes and forms, the fundamental difference between the primary and secondary process (and consequently primary process psychoanalytic symbolism and secondary process symbolism of communicative language) is maintained and emphasized. Traditionally, psychoanalytic (Freudian) symbolism is viewed in North America as a drive derivative and rooted in the primary process, as closer to an identity of perception, and as relatively restricted in content to disguised representations of the body self, infantile objects, birth and death, and associated infantile conflict and experience. Primary process symbolism differentiates from a phylogenetic protosymbolic complex, perhaps an undifferentiated semiotic function, prior to and in parallel with, the symbolic processes of the 'secondary process' and of the rational ego. Psychoanalytic symbolism is traditionally viewed as independent of language and culture and as having relatively universal forms, characteristics, and relationships to repression and archaic ego function. While not essentially communicative, psychoanalytic symbolism may be employed in the service of sublimation and adaptation. More recently, however some North American authors point to Freud’s (1910b) “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words”, where he wrote: “The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. ‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing” (p. 214). Referencing Abel’s work on ancient languages, in which contradictions exist side by side without eliminating each other, Freud concluded: “In view of these and many similar cases of antithetical meaning … it is beyond doubt that in one language at least there was a large number of words that denoted at once a thing and its opposite. However astonishing it may be, we are faced with the fact and have to reckon with it” (p. 215).
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