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embraces the less visible role of tone, gesture, and rhythm, for example, in meaning and the innovative capacities of subjects.” (Beardsworth 2004, p. 25.) The category of ‘the symbolic’ comes originally from Lacan’s (1966) modification of structural linguistics. Kristeva’s ‘Semiotics’ addresses how language begins to happen through the impact of sounds and rhythms on the embryo within the body of the pregnant ‘speaking mother’. From a developmental inter-disciplinary perspective, Kristeva’s approach shows the value of linguistic and literary interdisciplinary perspectives in thinking about the role of symbolization in its primary psychic functions in human communication. Anna Arragno proposes revisions to the understanding of artistic creativity based on a biosemiotics model of mind and communication (Aragno 1997, 2009). Aragno’s updated model of hierarchical conceptualization of mental functioning conceives a continuum founded on microgenetic progressions in stages of semiotic mediation correlating with current developmental and neurobiological findings, processes fueled by human impulses to communicate, express, represent, record, and codify. Aragno focuses on functional formal transformations obtained through symbolization. Of particular import is the structure of dream formation viewed as a natural template for more elaborate conscious creations serving personal functions for the individual analogous to those served by art for society. Susan Deri (1984)’s “Symbolization and Creativity” presents an expansion of the concept of symbol formation, to which she attributes an innate gestalt quality (ordering), shaping the content of the deepest layers of the nonrepressed unconscious. Symbols represent something absent and can be therapeutically reworked or reframed, as the symbol is always a shorthand for a larger amount of content which it symbolizes. The object is the increasing articulation of data through the transformation from primary to secondary processes. To Deri (1974), symbolization is a basic act of mind, from which clinical concepts derive: de-symbolization is defined as a type of repression whereby an unnatural de-articulation of form occurs. Denial becomes a hiding of a symbol from consciousness in the preconscious. Phobias can be viewed as mis-symbolizations due to an incorrect bridge between symbol and symbolized. Compulsive behavior can be seen as responding to signs (something present) rather than symbols (something absent). Deri (1984) viewed the symbol-making urge as an effort to create “order and connectedness within a person's psychic organization as well as bridging from the inside to the outside” (p. 5). In her model of mind, transformation is a re- symbolization, and it characterizes the activity at the boundaries among mental structures as well as at the boundaries between the primary and secondary process.
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