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then emerge as whole, separate people and can be appreciated as separate centers of subjectivity (Aron 1995, pp. 211-212). Utilizing Ogden’s ‘third’ and Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ within the intersubjective relational context, Jill Gentille (2001, 2008) develops her view of the emergence of the human subjectivity, intersubjectivity, agency, and ‘transitional subject’, in relation to symbolization. She contends that while typically psychoanalysis has placed the accent on the father's role, from a perspective guided by the child's (or patient's) emergent agency, the most remarkable feature of the Oedipus complex is that a third person comes into being as a sexual subject. Describing the process by which the patient comes into being as a ‘transitional symbolic subject’, living a ‘symbolic life’, she states: “Transitional subject anchors her desires in a realm beyond the strictly psychical that does not belong to the strictly material, creating a legacy or personal imprint generated at the cusp of subjective creation and material life, at once deeply personal and culturally symbolic” (Gentile 2008, pp. 972-973). IV. J. Symbol Formation in Developmental Perspectives (North American and International Authors influential in North America) Jean Piaget (1951) provided developmental markers and a description of the development of cognitive abilities involved in symbolic processes (‘symbolic play’). For Piaget, the symbol is an attempt at assimilating affective schemas and is not indicative of repression or the existence of a censoring agency: Piaget viewed the field of unconscious as more encompassing than that accounted for by repression and what could be censored. Piaget did not see a need to distinguish between conscious and unconscious symbols and proposed that symbolic thought formed a whole. His major distinction regarding symbol formation is between primary and secondary symbols . Through primary symbols the child understands the meaning of the symbol and can express it readily in a symbolic make-believe play. The child is aware, to some extent, that he substitutes one object for another, so that a block represents a truck or a piece of clay is manipulated as if it were food. Secondary symbolism is used by Piaget to describe situations in which the child is unaware of the connection between the symbol and the object. However, Piaget finds the distinction between the two symbolic forms relative, since every symbol is both conscious and unconscious, depending on the perspective taken and the degree of awareness of the person. In this vein, the unconscious is not a separate region of the mind for Piaget: there is an intellectual and affective unconscious; the difference between the two is a matter of degree. In his view, symbolic thought is prelogical and it is the primitive expression of the assimilation of affective schemas. Unconscious symbolic thought is characteristic of all thought, which is most obvious in children’s play or dreams. Both ‘oneiric’ and ‘ludic’ symbols exist on a conscious-unconscious continuum; as they are both attempts at the assimilation of affective schemas. Oneiric symbols arise while
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