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drawn by the child by the end of the second year of life, when the sense of self becomes conscious to the developing ego. The circle is thus linked to Winnicott’s idea of a transitional object (Winnicott, 1951) which is not part of the bodily self, but has been ‘found’, invented by the child before there is a fully structured ego. The circle is thus for Gaddini, ‘first and foremost a symbol’. This circular image will gradually be expanded into becoming a head and eventually, the well-known doll- like figure symbolically representing a person. Giovanni Hautmann (1989, 1990, 2002) links the early formation of the Self with the beginnings of symbolic capacities and the birth of the capacity for thinking. He emphasizes that the primitive mind is governed by an asymbolic matrix, in which sensory stimulations, perceptions, sensations, and primitive emotions prevail. The Self emerges from this original protomental protosymbolic matrix, with an oscillation between an asymbolic, dispersed condition, and an impulse towards integration and symbolic expression. Following Bion's theories on the protomental apparatus, Hautmann defines the asymbolic matrix as ‘protomental magma’. The oscillations of the primitive mind can be intercepted, contained and understood by the analyst's reverie and re-signified through his interpretative activity (See the separate entry SELF). According to Renata Gaddini (1977, 2004), longitudinal studies have shown that in the process of growing the child goes from sensations to perceptions and feelings and symbols, and finally, to thoughts. The transitional object is the first observable step in early symbolization, a base for the development of secondary process thinking. On the basis of these longitudinal studies Gaddini has been able to show how the quality of the mother-infant interaction allows the development of the bodily self. Mental-symbolic activity arises from body experience and helps the child master disintegration anxieties and fears, and his fantasy helps to save him from disintegration (See the separate entry SELF).
VI. FURTHER AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA
IV. A. Multiple Influential Perspectives of Early Authors (1930’s – 1960)
IV. Aa. Bertram Lewin (1933), synthesizing Ferenczi’s work on symbolism with Franz Alexander’s psychosomatic medicine and Freud’s concept of body ego, presented clinical material showing the symbolism of the body in certain types of psychopathology. He demonstrated how the body could become a symbolic representation of a phallus, and can thereby result in analyzable psychopathology. Later, within the context of his theorization on the ‘dream screen’ (1948), Lewin (1955) pointed out that an entire analytic session could be
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