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For Charles Sarnoff (1970, 1976, 2002-2003), in a symbolic play, the infant must be able to perceive similarities on the basis of superficial cues which may lead to the establishment of mental linkages; displacement occurs along the linkages formed by the perception of similarities; some capacity for delay is necessary for the acceptance of symbolic gratification, and the motivation for displacement may be relief from drive urgency or the protection of the self-object from aggressive urges. Developmentally, there is a progression from metaphorical symbols to true psychoanalytic symbols. Sarnoff contends that metaphors are expressed through fixed pathways that permit the displaced expression of drives. These pathways, or “symbolic 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 “[H]ypotheses 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.,
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