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Consequently, in a relatively new interpretation of Freud’s genesis of symbolization processes, some contemporary North American authors point to the linguistic foundation for contradiction and controversy, as they follow Freud’s attunement to proverbs and aphorisms in which linguistic contradictions spring up with apparently endless variations. Following Freud, Gediman (2011) notes parallelisms between pairs of proverbs that contain contrary wisdom and pairs of psychoanalytic propositions that similarly appear to contain contradictory messages and directions of thought, looking for parallels between the structure of language in time-tested sayings and the structures of apparently different listening modes, noting ubiquitous multiplicity and contradiction in the language of aphorisms and proverbs, e.g. “Silence is golden,” and, “A squeaky wheel gets the grease.” (Gediman 2011, p. 623). Thus, in this particular interpretation of Freud’s view of symbolism (of dreams and unconscious fantasies), the primary process symbolism (of dreams and fantasies) and secondary process symbolism (of communicative language) are understood to work bidirectionally.
II. B. Other Early Theorists
II. Ba. Karl Abraham In his early never translated German language paper (1911a), Abraham wrote about mother’s symbolic representation repeatedly across cultures: either a lonely house in a garden or forest or a hidden room with narrow access – corresponding to cultural mythologies: Garden of Eden and Noah’s arc. Noah’s travels last exactly the duration of pregnancy (9 months). To point out the universality of such symbolic representations, Abraham also brought up a little known Russian ethnic cult of worshipers of the mother’s body. In his “Giovanni Segantini: a psychoanalytic essay” (1911b), its later rendition (1925) and its belated English translation (1937), Abraham gave account of unconscious symbolism and processes of sublimation deriving from the mother’s body. Drawing on the great painter Segatini’s self-report, he describes in detail the gradual symbolic substitution/transformation/sublimation of the painter’s early imagery and fantasies of his mother’s body into unforgettable paintings of Alpine scenery with beautiful flowers and dramatic nature. Abraham substantiates the claim of symbolic substitution/transformation, evincing such Segatini’s masterpieces as “The Mothers”, “Springtime in the Alps”, “Ploughing in the Engadine”, “The Return to the Mother Country” , and others. Interestingly, Segatini lost his mother at the same age as Leonardo da Vinci did, before he turned 5 years old. It is Freud’s “Leonardo da Vinci and Memory of his Childhood” (Freud 1910a), that Abraham references and whose ideas on sublimation he substantiates and further develops. In both papers, the symbolic processes concern the symbolic reworking of infantile sexuality, to which great artists have an uncommon access, as a source of creative sublimation in the widest sense, encompassing oral, anal and oedipal symbols. The broad themes of mother’s face and her body being the first esthetic symbols have been further developed by many later and contemporary
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