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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 Aragno proposes revisions to the understanding of artistic creativity based on a biosemiotic 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. In her paper “Symbolization and Creativity” Susan Deri (1984) presents an expansion of the concept of symbol formation and “attributes an innate gestalt, or ordering, quality to the content of the deepest layer of the nonrepressed unconscious. This process […] is central to the transformation from primary to secondary processes. The laying to rest of data, a goal posited by Fechner is hardly a goal of mental life. Rather, the increasing articulation of data is the object. 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.” (P. Deri 1990, p. 487) To Deri (1974), symbolization is a basic act of mind, from which clinical concepts derive: “De-symbolization becomes a type of repression whereby an unnatural de-articulation of form occurs. Denial then becomes a hiding of a symbol from consciousness in the preconscious. Phobias can be viewed as missymbolizations due to an incorrect bridge between symbol and symbolized. Compulsive behavior can be seen as responding to signs rather than symbols. […] 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). […] “transformation, that is, resymbolization, more than conflict characterizes the activity at the boundaries among mental structures as well as at the boundaries between levels of consciousness” (P. Deri 1990, p. 488).
VI. Aa. Example of a Study of Symbol Formation in Society and Culture C. Fred Alford (1999) conducted a psychoanalytic comparative sociological-cultural study of symbolization in prison inmates and the non-incarcerated population with the regard
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