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Susan Deri wrote only two books. The first appeared four years after her flight from Budapest in 1940. The introduction to the Szondi Test reflected her years of apprenticeship to Lipot Szondi. The second, and sadly, last book, finished shortly before her death in 1983, concerns interests she had during her entire career as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. Symbolism and Creativity has become the final statement of a highly articulate member of the New York City intellectual psychoanalytic scene. The book is a sophisticated, comprehensive explication of the author's development of what she terms "a generic theory of symbolism."
Deri believed, and I would concur, that many psychoanalysts carry a rather limited knowledge of the developmental aspects of symbolism, the symbolic process itself, and the relation of symbolism to language and nonverbal communication. This is in the context of clinical psychoanalysis being a field that is nursed by Freud's concept of symbols with unconscious referents, a field that by definition takes place within the symbolic arena of the psychoanalytic situation. Perhaps this lacuna in knowledge is not so surprising because clinical psychoanalysis takes for granted the patient's capacity to symbolize, to ego-observe, and to maintain an "as-if" illusion about the transference. Deri's patients (the book is sprinkled with helpful clinical reports and vignettes) seem to have had difficulties in the course of the development of their symbolic capacities, their self- and object differentiation, and the establishment of self- and object constancy. As Deri acknowledges, theory is influenced by one's patients, hence her concern with the various constitutional and environmental factors that lead to the ability to have and enjoy a symbolic world that mediates between the inner representational world and the perceptual world. This concern leads in turn to the necessity of understanding the genesis of the symbol.