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of female body reproductive functioning is helpful in exploring female body anxieties as a more defined and specifically symbolized bodily referent than can be encompassed by more general symbolic representations of separation anxieties.
IV. D. Examples from Contemporary Ego Psychology Charles Sarnoff
In his ego-based schema of the development of symbolic capacity, Charles Sarnoff (1976, 2002-2003) upholds Jones’ narow definition of formation of psychoanalytic symbols arising from the work of repression. He also differentiates the primary, simple metaphoric symbols which are directly connected to what they represent, from true psychoanalytic symbols, which are modified by repression, thus more distant from affective immediacy of emotional conflicts, more complex, sophisticated and overdetermined representations. Repression transforms metaphorical or primary (relatively simple) symbols into psychoanalytic symbols. This point is essential to his theory of symbolization during latency period, during which the child is in the process of acquiring distance from the conflicts represented through the symbol. Eric R. Marcus Marcus (1999, 2003) pointed out that, while Freud regarded thing presentations as present only in unconscious thought, they are ubiquitously present also in conscious ideation. He further described the thing presentation as a type of symbolic representation in which affect is represented in a perceptual mode. Evident in the form of fantasy, dreams, art and architecture, thing presentations are viewed here as part of all human emotional experience that is symbolically represented. Joseph Fernando Fernando (2009) introduced the idea of the zero process as a way of conceptualizing post- traumatic mental functioning, and he suggested that it could be put alongside the primary process and the secondary process, which together would then be considered the three major ways the mind organizes itself. Since in many psychoanalytic conceptualizations of symbolism differentiation between primary process and secondary process symbols plays an important part (Blum, 1978), the idea of the zero process introduces the question of the relation of post traumatic functioning to the primary process and to Freudian symbolism. Fernando (2012, 2018a, 2018b) noted that during trauma ego functions such as integration and symbolization are shut down. Post traumatic functioning, which Fernando designates as the zero process, thus lacks the normal symbolization not just of the secondary process but also of the primary process. In the zero process, the little bits and pieces of perception and affect that are stitched together to form our normal experience of the world, and our regular memories, remain
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