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VII. Aa. Example of a Study of Symbol Formation in Society and Culture Fred Alford (1999) conducted a psychoanalytic comparative sociological-cultural study of symbolization in prison inmates and the non-incarcerated population with the regard to ‘formless dread’ which in his thinking relates to the ‘evil’ in human nature. He found that: “…Everyone experiences this dread in one form or another. Whether we do evil depends, in good measure, upon whether we can find and use abstract symbolic forms to express and contain our dread. If we cannot, we are more likely to inflict this dread on others in the form of violence, or more subtle acts of sadism. The inmates spoken with have far more difficulty finding and using these symbolic forms than do free citizens. It is what makes them so vulnerable to their dread, and so dangerous to others, communicating their dread by acting it out on the bodies of their victims” (p. 29). From such findings, the author concludes that “the ability to imagine evil, and so give it symbolic form, is an alternative to doing it” (p. 33). Addressing himself to the complementarity and mutual fortification of the fixed and idiosyncratic aspects of symbols, Alford notes that the cultural symbol is used as the child uses a transitional object: investing it with the power of self and other, creating meaning out of things. The cultural and traditional symbolic endowment is ‘inherited’ actively through “an unconscious cycle of projection, cultural containment, and reintrojection of re-formed experience” (1999, p. 45). Alford brings the example of Picasso’s “Guernica”, which represents the carnage caused by Franco's bombing of the Spanish village. While some have argued that Picasso was inspired by photographs of the bombed village, Mary Gedo (1980) argues that he was inspired by quite another event: a devastating earthquake that Picasso had experienced when he was three, an earthquake that accompanied the birth of his baby sister. [Harold Blum (2013) additionally mentions Picasso’s devastation at the death of his older sister.] Believing he was the “earthshaker”, Picasso took the earthquake to be a mark of his rage at one sister’s birth, possibly later still fortified by complicated feelings of helplessness about his other sister’s death, a rage and helplessness that had been rekindled in his complex domestic life in the months before he painted “Guernica” . “Guernica”, argues Alford, then “becomes an even richer work, gaining its power from the way it combines the private and public. Into the village that was Guernica (a village that was already a symbol), Picasso poured his own earthshaking Guernica, creating the painting Guernica. This is how symbols become meaningful, …we fill them with ourselves. Only the artist takes it a step further, transforming the conjunction of personal and social into a new cultural symbol” (1999, p. 46). Alford believes that the distance (and perhaps ambiguity) is necessary for symbols to perform their holding and containing function. Standards for Greek tragedies forbade the enactment of violence on stage. Only its results could be displayed. The katharsis of pity and
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