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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 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 ark. 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) and its second edition (1925), which appeared in an English translation in 1937, Abraham gave account of unconscious symbolism and processes of sublimation deriving from the mother’s body. Drawing on the great painter Segantini’s self-report, he describes in detail gradual symbolic substituion/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 substituion/transformation, evincing such Segantini’s masterpieces as “The Mothers”, “Springtime in the Alps”, “Ploughing in the Engadine”, “The Return to the Mother Country” , and others. Interestingly, Segantini 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 authors of different theoretical leanings, including those who viewed it through the lens of attachment, or Bionian reverie (Bucci 2003, Civitarese 2015).
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