Symbolism and Mental Representation

In the course of my studies on the psychoanalytic aspects of art, I found it necessary to learn more about the concept of symbolism, a concept central to any theory dealing with the “nonlogical” functions of the mind, such as the phenomena of dream, fantasy, symptom formation, and art. The more I delved into the study of the concept, the more confused I found myself. I discovered that every author approaches symbolism from another angle and understands its meaning differently, so that no generally shared formulation and theory explaining symbolism exists. It is not surprising, then, that such a concept, which is used by so many disciplines, in science, philosophy, and art, is vague in its formulation and ambiguous in its meaning.

When the various meanings given the term in psychoanalytic and related literature are surveyed, three main approaches emerge:

1. There are authors who refer to symbolism as a mode of thinking, as a kind of mental process, which they call “symbolic thinking,” “symbolic process,” etc.

2. Others regard symbolism as a technique of mental representation. They speak of “symbolic representation,” “symbol formation,” and so on.

3. Many confine symbolism to the realm of communication only and approach the symbol as a means, aside from signs and signals, of communicating.

When examining the first approach, we see that the term “symbolic thinking” is used loosely, as synonymous with such terms as paleologic, dereistic, or archaic thinking, all of which are actually synonymous with the term “primary-process thinking.” Since I do not know of any serious study which tries to isolate “symbolic processes” as distinct from what we know as “primary processes,” I consider it irrelevant to continue to discuss this approach.

The third approach, which confines symbolism to communication only, does not really exclude the second one. Any system of communication depends