Back to Table of Contents
linkages,” occur during the same developmental phase as Piaget's symbolic play (from 15 to 24 months) and may be viewed as the psychoanalytic analog of symbolic play. True psychoanalytic symbols arise from and are modified by repression; thus, they are more complex, sophisticated representations, while metaphorical symbols have a more immediate and developmentally primitive meaning, being directly connected to that which they represent. On the other hand, the person using psychoanalytic symbols has acquired a distance from the conflicts. Latency is the period during which such a distance becomes a possibility. There are wide-reaching changes in the functioning of the ego during latency and that these changes cluster around the growing child's ability to better use symbols. Sarnoff suggests that fantasy becomes the vehicle through which this change takes place: the child gains mastery through fantasy. Gerard Donnellan (1980), too, maintains that an adequate description of the changes of the latency period must account for the child's expanded capacity to use symbols in a unique way, i.e., to express wishes and impulses in a less direct, aim-inhibited way. These achievements reflect structural changes that become manifest in better impulse control – a burgeoning interest in cognitive mastery and the use of language, rather than action, for the expression of wishes. Clinically, this thinking proves useful in that the restructuring of the latency ego may be fostered through the use of psychoanalytic symbols in fantasy. Studying the symbol formation from the developmental-dynamic viewpoint, Harold Blum (1978) surveys theoretical writings, as well as child observation studies of Piaget, Spitz, Mahler, Winnicott, and puts forth a hypothesis that psychoanalytic symbolism requires rudimentary ego development and probably does not appear until after the phase of self-object differentiation, at the beginning of the second year of life. Psychoanalytic symbolism equates elements of the body ego and object world, and in the first year of life, during the predominantly oral phase, the infant lacks a fully developed body ego (Fliess 1973, p. 23), the rudimentary ego functions and repression requisite to a symbolic process with characteristic features. Blum notes that hypotheses concerning symbol formation involve preverbal and proto- verbal observations and reconstructions with inevitable assumptions and conjecture. Studies of symbolism related to incomplete self-object differentiation and oral conflict (e.g., breast, teeth, tongue, etc.) point to the probable appearance of 'unconscious' symbolism after the transitional object (Winnicott 1967) and before the semantic, abstract 'no'. (Spitz 1957). The first unconsciously derived symbols would then differentiate from a proto-symbolic complex at the beginning of the second year, roughly coincident with the development of a more secure, stable representation of the primary object and the practicing subphase of separation-individuation. It is a time of expanding communication and exploratory play, of self-comforting increasingly suggestive of symbolic roles, of more complex mental manipulations with enduring and differentiated agents and actions, objects and properties. Body boundaries and the body image are undergoing rapid schematization. The definite emergence of symbolic processes can be
884
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online