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“This mode is a primitive psychological organization operative from birth that generates the most elemental forms of human experience. It is sensory-dominated in which the most inchoate sense of self is built upon the rhythm of sensation, particularly at the skin’s surface… Sequences, symmetries, periodicity, skin-to-skin ‘molding’ are examples of contiguities that are the ingredients out of which the beginnings of rudimentary self-experience arise” (Ogden, 1989, pp. 30-31). The core contribution here is that the contiguity of surfaces generates an experience of a sensory surface, rather than a feeling of two surfaces coming together either in differentiating opposition or in merger. In the autistic-contiguous mode of experience there is no symbolization. Bodily experiences, impressions of shapes, forms and rhythms take the place of symbols. Symbols require frames, a form to contain the symbol and set it off from the experience it represents. Without this frame there can be no symbol, only experience without locus or boundary. Drawing a link between becoming a subject and symbolization, Ogden (1994) refers to an “oedipal/symbolic third”, a concept which refers to “a ‘middle term’ that stands between symbol and symbolized, between oneself and one's immediate lived sensory experience, thereby creating a space in which the interpreting, self-reflective, symbolizing subject is generated (p. 4, note 2). This “oedipal/symbolic third,” in Ogden's conception, provides the container for the Oedipus complex, which “facilitates the triangularization of experience … the emotional presence of the father [introduces] thirdness, a vantage point outside of the mother-infant dyad.… In this sense, the Oedipus complex is the exit from the nonreflective, twoness of the paranoid-schizoid position” (pp. 124-126). In this perspective, it is thus in the (third) space between two subjects, between symbol and symbolized, and amidst the triangular space of mother, father, and child, that the human subject emerges. IV. F. Examples of Contemporary Integrations Hans Loewald A transitional figure, Hans Loewald (1988) recognizes symbolization as the central function of defensive and non-defensive integrative mental activity. Challenging Jones’s (1916) assertion that symbolization always reflects repressed mental content, Loewald points out several instances of non-defensive signs of symbolization. Within his paradigm of integrative and disintegrative movements participating in the formation of psychic structure in development and in the psychoanalytic process, Loewald sees symbolization as essentially propelling integration.
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