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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 them capable of being represented by images–particularly visual images” (p. 389). The result is a "figuration" of the dream thoughts. For instance, aristocracy can be symbolized in a dream as a high tower. Most of the French authors who have raised the question of symbolization from the psychoanalytic point of view, consider the example of the "cotton-reel game", also known as ‘fort-da’ game, of “disappearance-return” (Freud 1920, p.13) as a typical testimony to a work of symbolization in the young child’s psyche. Freud (1920, pp. 13–17) described a game in which the infant held a wooden reel by a string and threw it over the edge of his curtained cot so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive "o-o-o-o”, possibly his expression for “fort” [ “away”]. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and
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