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for symbol formation which he finds in his dream life (1997, p. 176). The limitations of conventional language with its restricted amount of signs and worn out symbols can lead to emotionally impoverished verbal approximations of the complexity of unconscious meanings, with the implications for psychoanalytic discourse. In this vein, he stresses the importance of Bion’s ideogram and the emphasis on dreaming. Symbolic expression cannot always rely on verbal interpretation, whereas other forms of visual and artistic expression can represent internal experience often in a much richer way. Briefly, other authors have described difficulties or defensive obstacles in creating a third position (Britton, 1989), as well as in the creation of a three-dimensional space for thinking (Bick, 1968). Others see a failure to tolerate and occupy paradoxical space (Winnicott, 1953; Parsons, 2000). These all are seen as precluding symbol formation. III. Ab. The British Independent Tradition From Freud’s early work on hysteria and his account of the hysterical symptom as a representation of libidinal conflict, psychoanalysis has maintained a consistent interest in the human capacity to register how one thing may stand for another through symbolic structures and forms which can be identified and used in the consulting room. A concern with different forms of symbolising and of symbols themselves and what they make available to the human subject is central to all psychoanalytic theories, and to those of the human sciences and the humanities. The attention to symbolisation so evident in contemporary psychoanalytic accounts derives from rather different theories of where symbols originate, their possible universality, and the psychological capacities on which they depend and the functions they carry. The British Independents’ approach to symbol formation and its relation to theories of early infantile life, creativity and psychoanalysis is exemplified through the work of Donald Winnicott and Marion Milner who outline the parameters for much of, if not all subsequent work within the Object Relations’ theories perspectives. Another member of the original circle of British Independents was Charles Rycroft , whose original reformulation of Freud’s theory of symbolism was especially recognized and widely influential in North American psychoanalytic thought. His contribution is noted among the early influential authors in North American section. III. Aba. Donald Winnicott and Contemporary Elaboration by Malcom Bowie Winnicott’s conceptualisation of an intermediate or transitional area ( transitional space ) occupying a mental and psychic space between internal and external reality was first outlined in a paper given to the British society in 1951 and published 1953. His account of human nature insists on the continuing place of illusion as a resource for living in and with the complex intertwining of external and internal realities that comprises ordinary life. He
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