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authors of different theoretical leanings, including those who viewed it through the lens of attachment, or Bionian reverie (Bucci 2003, Civitarese 2015). It is worth noting that in the same paper, already in 1911, that Abraham (1911b) also suggested that sublimation and symbolic representation of internal conflicts can have both a defensive and a reparative function – a theme later developed further by Melanie Klein. II. Bb. Karl Jung In his “Symbols of Transformation”, Jung (1912) de-emphasized the importance of infantile sexuality and stressed the collective unconscious in the formation of symbols. For Jung, symbols emerge from the personal or collective unconscious spontaneously in dreams and everyday life. If the dreamer’s associations are correctly understood, the content will carry an emotional charge and become a part of the individual's private myth. The main function of the symbol is to transform energy and reconcile opposites within the psyche. When psychic energy is blocked, as in depression, the resultant inactivity on the conscious level stimulates symbol-making activity in the unconscious, pointing the way to new goals so that life can flow on. Religious symbols are the self-revelation of archetypal forces from the collective unconscious capable of giving meaning to whole societies and eras. They often occur in similar forms throughout the world. II. Bc. Sandor Ferenczi In his two main publications on the subject, “Ontogenesis of Symbols (1913) and “Symbolism of the Bridge” (1922), Ferenczi elaborates on Freud’s topographical description of the formation of symbols. He stresses a physiological basis of this process that expresses in some way the whole body or an organ of the body or its function, dynamics of the repression, and the psychophysical intensities involved in the interplay of conflicting forces. Additionally, Ferenczi stresses specific data as to the symbol’s ontogenesis and phylogenesis, and the ‘affective moment’ in formation of true psychoanalytic symbols, as distinguishable from metaphors, parables, and similes. Ferenczi holds that identification, the forerunner of symbolism, arises out of the baby’s endeavor to rediscover in every object his own organs and their functioning. Crucial presence of ‘affect’ (i.e., fear of losing tooth or penis, coinciding chronologically, may end up symbolically representing each other in the psychic material) is a prerequisite of symbol formation, which Ferenczi orders in the following way: 1) Things that are similar to one another are equated with one another by the child (penis = tooth, castration = tooth pulling). That corresponds to the way in which the Unconscious deals with images in general (dream, joke).
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