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V Bd. Ruggero Levy (Brazil) In “From Symbolizing to Non-Symbolizing within the Scope of a Link: from Dreams to Shouts of Terrors Caused by an Absent Presence”, Levy (2012) has enriched the understanding of the symbolization process and also its flaws. Strongly influenced by Bion, also referencing Winnicott and Green, Levy uses Bion's model of the early mother-baby relationship of Containment: container-contained (See the separate entry CONTAINMENT: CONTAINER-CONTAINED). In this relationship, the baby introjects the mother’s alpha function apparatus. It is this apparatus that allows the subject to make contact with his/her emotional life and to be able to transform emotions into alpha elements. For Levy, symbol formation represents the 'truth' of emotional experience ; he explores "what happens when this 'truth' needs to be distorted, attacked, or destroyed because of the psychic pain associated with it or because of the unbearable meaning it carries". In this context, he theorizes various situations in which the symbol formation is interfered with by beta elements, primitive emotions, which cannot be transformed into alpha elements-. In such situations, there is no symbol formation, or there is the destruction of symbols already created. He respectively refers to "non-symbols" and "de-symbolization". He most important failures in psychic development are caused by attacks on the alpha function that arise from envy which in its turn, is based on the death drive. When transformation into alpha elements is not possible, and primitive emotions cannot be symbolized, they cannot be repressed or forgotten: "only through their symbolization can these intense emotions be inserted into the symbolic chain and be worked through, then repressed and later ‘forgotten’“ (p. 856). Both non-symbols and de-symbolization are found in the most severely compromised patients, as described by Green as the work of the negative. The reverie of the analytic couple, allows the symbolization of intense emotions present in the analytic field, making the transformation into alpha elements possible. In his earlier work, Levy (2007) describes a specific approach to adolescence and the requisite subjectivation process it entails. He studies adolescence from multiple angles, centering on narcissism and the fact that at this stage of life a symbolic re-ordering takes place: "a painful process of de-construction and re-construction of a system of representations, to the emergence of a new subjectivity in the symbolic universe of the subject" (p. 365). The adolescent body demands a great deal of work from the psyche in order to assimilate the "strange" of itself and of the gaze of others. The symbolic reordering allows the adolescent to leave behind the anxieties of annihilation resulting from the threat to the self. Failure in this experience of subjectivation, would give rise to a traumatic adolescence.
V. Bc. José Renato Avzaradel (Brazil) Avzaradel (2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2011, 2024) has been developing his ideas on symbolization over the last two decades.
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