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Charlotte Balkányi (1961, 1964, 1968) connects symbolization to language, verbalization, and the development of rules. Here, psychoanalytic symbols, as in Blum’s definition below, have perceptual and sensory roots and always refer to the body ego, infantile instinctual aims and objects, erogenous zones and functions. Ernest Jones, cited above, addresses the disguise of the psychoanalytic symbol that is based on repression. In his account, that which does not need to undergo repression is not symbolized. Connecting the archaic connection of symbols to body functions and the place of ‘de-repression’ in her understanding of symbolism, Balkányi examines the beginnings of language and verbalization using her unpacking of the swear word in children and the psychoanalysis of the swear word in stammerers to arrive at the following observations: “I respect swear words as the archaelogist respects fossils. They carry the message of a great battle fought not only some three hundred years ago but also in the individual life in each of us. They are the only words which when pronounced make us feel the effect of repression” (1968; p.717). Reflecting on the effect of repression, she writes: “When the swear word produces embarrassment it is the battle of toilet training which is revived. When the reaction is laughter, that indicates that the original symbolic meaning of language has reappeared momentarily. We laugh for joy; it is as if our pregenital time had come back to us for a short visit. In the anal phase, before toilet training, verbalization was a symbolizing game…” (1968; p.717). It follows that, after the anal phase, the ordering of reality goes through symbols. Paul Pruyser (1968) explores further how humans order reality through symbols as follows: “symbolism does not organize the perceptual manifold by intellectual reduction. It retains perceptual impressions in an especially rich and glorious way by letting each thing be itself as well as a hint at something else that transcends perceptual registration” (1968, p.101). In contrast, the failure to let a thing be itself and not itself, leading to a sort of weaving together of unassorted heap of objects, shows itself in syncretism. Thus, “in syncretistic thought organization”, Pruyser writes, “essential differences are glossed over in favor of a loose or highly contrived unity” (ibid, p.97). This is the highly contrived unity that is found in Hannah Segal’s account of “symbolic equation” (1957); the merger of symbol and referent; as in the musician who collapses and condenses not practicing his violin playing with the prohibition that selfsame regressed patient attaches to masturbation. In 1983, Pruyser brought together Freud’s notion of an illusion (1927), as steppingstone, with Winnicott’s theory of “transitional objects and transitional phenomena” (1953) to create his theory of the “ play of the imagination”. Here, there is on the one hand, an autistic world and, on the other, a realistic world. Between the autistic world and the realistic world, there lies an illusionistic third world. Between the autistic world of symptoms and the realistic world of signs and indices, there lie symbols in the illusionistic third world.
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