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withdraws from reality, stopping the formation of symbols. This excess of anguish constitutes then an impediment to interacting with reality. Consequently, in analytic play therapy, the analyst interprets, names, and puts words to these archaic phantasies, with the aim to reduce the magnitude of anxieties, therefore lessening such anguish and suffering. The baseline principle for Klein is that what children play and do during their analytic sessions represent, above all, attacks on the mother's womb and parental coitus, which is seen (by a child) as sadistic. North American analysts (Lew Aron 1995) highlight the developmental significance of Klein’s (1929a,b) and later Britton’s (1989) formulation of a phantasy of a combined parental figure, predating symbolization. The combined parent figure represents a fusion of elements (i.e., part-objects) whose qualities are not clearly distinguished and whose union produces a sense of chaos. The phantasies that constitute the combined parent figures become transformed as the child develops the capacity for whole-object relations and establishes a separate sense of self with the capacity for symbolization. As children move from functioning predominantly in the paranoid-schizoid mode to functioning predominantly in the depressive mode, the internal imago of the combined parent figure becomes transformed into the image of their parents as separate whole-objects in a mutually gratifying interaction with each other. Now, with a sense of themselves as separate and with the capacity for symbolic thought, children can elaborate the group of phantasies which constitutes the primal scene. III. Aab. Hanna Segal (and Sanchez’ Contemporary Elaboration) Segal (1950, 1957, 1979) made a major contribution in that she described the merger of symbol and referent as a symbolic equation and indicated that the non-differentiation between the thing symbolized and the symbol represented a disturbance in object relations and a fixation to concrete thinking. The symbols themselves are experienced and used concretely and are unavailable for purposes of communication. While both Ferenczi (1912) and Jones (1916) have previously recognized the phenomenon, and Klein (1930) used the term, Segal (1950, 1957) gave it an enriched conceptual precision and provided lucid clinical illustrations of how an object and another object that symbolically represents it become one and the same in the mind of a psychotic. She described ‘symbolic equation’ as part of a disturbance of ego’s relationship with the object world, implicating the pathological form of projective identification mechanism, when she wrote: “Parts of the ego and internal objects are projected into an object and identified with it. Differentiation between the self and the object is obscured” (Segal 1957, p. 53). It may be noteworthy that Segal, similarly as Klein, uses terms “to symbolize”, and the “process of symbol formation”, interchangeably.
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