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based on drives. Winnicott considers it arises in the transitional space between the mother and her baby. He speaks of "cultural experience as an extension of the transitional phenomena and playing ideas" (1971, p. 133). Other authors locate the cultural area in the continuum between pre-symbolization and symbolization processes. Ricoeur does so when he says that one pole of the symbolic is the interpretation of archaic meanings and the other opens towards the emergence of the symbolic in the future and that sublimation IS the symbolic function itself. Within the context of Lacanian theory, Berenstein similarly postulates that a psychic reorganization, which happens a posteriori, beyond childhood, can give rise to a new symbolic order. There is another aspect of the role of culture in expanding the symbolic world of the human being that stands out: the invitation made to the viewer to interact with the artist (and his/her art). A work of art invites those who contemplate it, read it, attend it, to continue the symbolization process initiated by the artist in such a way that it now becomes a symbolic co- construction, a living and continuous process. This area has been a subject of much conteporary scholarship, involving many dynamic interdisciplinary perspectives (Eco 1979, 2004; Kandel 2012). Arnold Modell (1970) posits that many symbols can be viewed as impersonal metaphors whose meaning is shared and derived from convention or myth and can be thought of as cultural artifacts. A snake in a dream may symbolize a penis, a conventional metaphor, or the image of a snake may represent something else entirely that has an idiosyncratic meaning for the dreamer. In another cultural context, that of ancient Greece, snakes did not symbolize the penis, but something very different; snakes represented a curative power associated with the healing cult of Asclepius, who is conventionally represented as leaning on a staff that is intertwined with a snake (Dodds 1951). Marshall Edelson (1972) applied linguistic theory to the investigation of symbolic form and function. His informative psycholinguistic studies raise significant questions about symbolic transformations, and translations of discourse in different disciplines. Edelson's propositions assume one basic 'symbolic function' of the mind, and attribute linguistic properties to unconscious processes, in which dreaming is then dependent on language. Increasingly influential in North America, Julia Kristeva (Kristeva 1974/1984; Beardsworth 2004) from the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris, has written on developmental psycholinguistics, semiotics and the birth of language since the 1970s. Her work connects closely with the recent Italian intersubjective neuropsychological developmental research of Ammaniti and Gallese (2014), noted above by Blum. Her longstanding psycho-linguistic work emerged with a distinction between ‘semiotic and symbolic functioning’. Here, symbolic functioning, “encompasses everything to do with communicative discourse, especially utterances with propositional content which say something to someone. The conception of the symbolic therefore covers the field of the meaningful object, that is to say, a representation, idea, or thing.” She distinguishes this from “Semiotic functioning [which]
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