Back to Table of Contents
world of neurosis, since the 1970s and 1980s in France, they are characteristic of psychological functioning that presents archaic relics of experiences that are or not integrated into the rest of the ego. As early as 1975, Piera Aulagnier , in her exploration of the processes present in psychotic functioning, proposed the term "pictogram" to define the first forms of this mode of symbolization. The pictogram is a representation that is defined by an ‘indissociability’ between body space, psychic space and external space and by a coalescence between affect and representation. It appears as a hallucinated sensation always linked to a fragment of body, below any differentiation between psyche and soma. Thus, the "corporal figuration" of the pictogram can be grasped by its transformation into the "scenic figuration" in the register of the primary symbolization (Brun and Roussillon 2014). Didier Anzieu (1987), for his part, proposed the term "formal signifiers" to designate processes, without subject or object, which represent the first "sensation-form-movement" of the first forms of psychic inscriptions. These processes concern the symbolic recording of the interface of the human baby's first encounters with its primary environment. Anzieu points to the particular relevance of such ‘formal signifiers’ and the processes they entail, for borderline personality organizations. These conceptualizations have been considerably developed in a series of colloquia at the "Bibliothèque D. Anzieu" research center in Lyon, which focused on the exploration of various forms of symbolization. From the developmental point of view, the modes of primary symbolization are dependent on the characteristics of the particularities of the psychic functioning of the first two years of human life, which registers above all the forms of the first links with the object, without precise representation of either the subject and its place or the object. Such conceptualizations are also consistent with the current research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and clinical studies of early infancy. Primary symbolization is mainly concerned with the representative shaping of the encounter, the mode of presence and the bond that is established from the infant's first experiences during the first years of air life. It underlies the capacities of secondary symbolization, which will take over when psychic reflexivity can be put in place and the little person will be able to represent that he/she represents, or that he/she does not represent (Donnet and Green1973), and will be able to access the scripted representations that characterize language in thing-representation (language known as "dream language" by Freud (1913c, p. 176)) and the language of the child's non-verbal forms of expression that open up the access to the verbal expression (cf. also Baranés 2002). All these works emphasize modes of symbolization that are no longer solely based on the absence of the object but that integrate into the theory of symbolization the modes of encounter and presence of the object as well as the form of the first links that are inscribed in the first years of life. These works identify the processes that are at the center, no longer of the infantile in the strict sense of the term, but of what concerns the archaic. They are of considerable importance in French-speaking psychoanalysis, which, mainly with reference to
870
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online