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Like Milner, he is interested in symbolisation as a creative act of the imagination. The unconscious meaning of a symbol will need to be analysed, and symbols may well have a defensive function. Overall, however, what matters more for Parsons is how understanding a symbol puts someone in touch with their imaginative capacities. Creative use of symbols in this way depends on accepting them as being real and not real at the same time. Parsons has linked symbolisation closely to his ideas about play, which depends on the same paradoxical freedom to be both real and nor real. This is the quality of Winnicott’s ‘transitional space’, and Parsons views playing with symbolisation in this area as an important way for someone to expand their creative imagination The independents’ approach to symbolisation derives from an account of human nature which sees the symbol as an original form of expression and the importance of the symbolic as part of very early thinking. Expansion and synthesis of British Object Relations thought on symbolization in North and Latin America will be explored in the respective regional sections below.
III. B. The French Tradition in Europe
III. Ba. General Ideas/Conceptualizations The concept of symbolization and the notions derived from it feature prominently in the publications of French authors. A report prepared by Alain Gibeault in 1989, for the Congress of French-speaking psychoanalysts, entitled "Fates of Symbolization" sought to define it as an essential mechanism for the construction of the psyche and in particular for the differentiation between the Ego and the Other. He defines it, in a classical way, as "the operation of substitution by which something will represent something else for someone", an unconscious mechanism that leads the author to consider that there is, in the psyche, a "work of symbolization" and a "correlative process" of differentiation between "the subject" and the "object". This way of seeing puts the cultural and linguistic aspects of symbolization in the background, discarding any symbolism of the "key to dreams" type or Jung-like archetypes, in favour of the study of what leads to the appearance of personal symbols in continuity with the world of representations. This way of seeing is linked to the notion of object change: the investment of the representation of an object is transposed onto what will symbolize it. From this point of view, the theoretical conceptions involving the processes of symbolization have also been expressed in terms of figuration and figurability. These terms derive from the word Representability Darstellbarkeit , figurability, translated into English by representability , used by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams to evoke the transformation of thoughts into images in the dream. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) define Representability as follows: “Requirement imposed on the dream-thoughts; they undergo selection and transformation such as to make
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