Editorial: Symbolization

In my youth a long time ago — I read an article in a literary journal Horisont, edited by a small Swedish society in northern Finland. The article consisted of a number of previously unpublished short, aphoristic formulations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of the paragraphs was about paintings describing hunting scenes created by human beings many thousand years ago. As I remember it, Wittgenstein argued against interpreting these paintings as an indication of a childish, naive and primitively magic mind of the people from whom they originated. In his opinion nothing in the paintngs suggested a belief that they were able to magically influence the outcome of the hunting by depicting successful hunting scenes. They were fully aware of the realistic options of their endeavours. gThe painting process was instead an integral part of the hunting, a way to achieve a favourable state of mind for the task in front of them. As we know, contemporary athletes use similar techniques as part of their performances.

The articles in this issue concern symbolization as an intrinsic human characteristic. Bianca Maria Sanches Favaret positions psychoanalysis in relation to a new paradigm of biology — the informational paradigm. In a central formulation she states:

Capable of processing information, capable of cognition and communication, all living creatures also share the capability to confer order to aleatoric events, to give these events meaning, that is, to create information from noise.

Bringing this conceptualisation to psychoanalytic phenomena Favaret suggests anxiety to be a ‘noise’ that appears when something foreign crosses organization levels. On a more complex level, the ‘noise’ may turn into information, i.e. into a meaningful symbolization. She suggests that the analytic couple forms a ‘more complex level’ capable of symbolizing what the individual cannot do on his own. This idea is similar to Bion's and Sullivan's reverie function.

Referring to Maturana , Favaret talks of orga