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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 ascribed to the early second year of life with semantic symbols and increasingly clear evidence of psychoanalytic symbolism as development proceeds” (Blum 1978, p. 466). Recently, Blum (2010, 2017) contends that advances coming out of infant research and developmental neurosciences (Ammaniti, Tambelli and Odorisio 2013; Ammaniti and Gallese 2014), tracking the earliest stages of development, including the prenatal fetal movements and early body schemes, could point to rudimentary proto-symbolic disposition of primary patterning of tension-relieving links between hand-mouth and skin, long before the developmental capacity for unconscious and communicative symbolization is available. Similarly, during the ‘pre-object world’, early synchronization (i.e., fetal heartbeat and movements responding to the sound of mother’s singing or calming voice) develops into signals that can be registered and provide a relief in distress (baby responding the sound of mother’s footsteps even before the mother appears). Psychosomatic and physiological markers of blood pressure and heartbeat rate, have been known to reflect synchronization and early registering of the mother’s affective disposition, as were overall affective and sensory-motor regulation within the mother-infant orbit. Within the infant-mother dyad, both participants feed and emotionally regulate the other, in a pre-symbolic exchange of bodily and emotional contents, later evolving into patterns of nuanced emotional-cognitive communication. From the point of view of symbol formation, all such phenomena may reflect archaic rudimentary signal capacity, which, in the course of development paves the way and transforms into the capacity for (unconscious as well as communicative) symbol formation. IV. K. Child Analysis: Thought Processes in Symbolic Play Phyllis Greenacre (1969, 1970) elaborates on the Winnicottian (1953) transitional object, which, with its potentiality for assuming many different forms and shapes in actual fact and in the infant's changing perceptions of the outer world in general, she sees as lending itself to symbolic representation. This is particularly important when, in early pre-oedipal development of the first two years of life, speech is still in process of formation. She further extends her theorizing on the transitional object in relation to illusion, symbolism and to creativity in general. She writes of the extreme complexity of perceptivity and changeable sensorimotor responses, occurring chiefly in the first two years of life, giving rise to multiple illusions en route to and in the service of stabilizing object appreciation. Such
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