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Psychoanalysis is a theory and practice of the symbol, but if we tried to clarify what this means, we would find many differences between one author and another. For this reason, to begin our paper, we intend to trace a simplified map of the mental space in which we move.
We will not deal with sexual symbolism, as it is meant in classical psychoanalysis, according to which, in fact, a person would not resort to symbols if he or she were simply able to satisfy his or her drives in a direct manner. On the contrary, we believe that the human being is a symbolic being from the very beginning, following a tradition of thought that originated with Ferenczi and has developed in many ramifications, including the contributions of Abraham and Torok.
What characterizes this tradition is the notion of symbolic adaptation, namely the idea that the creation of symbols is the tool by which human beings try to restore a lost equilibrium. This perspective implies an important change vis-à-vis Freudian metapsychology: according to Freud, the pleasure principle searches for equilibrium within the psychic apparatus, whereas Ferenczi was interested in the equilibrium between the individual and his or her changeable environment. This shift in meaning leads to an alternative vision in the understanding of life's fundamental tendency. Just as Fairbairn replaced the Freudian view of libido as pleasure-seeking with the view of libido as object-seeking (Fairbairn, 1941, 1944), we would be tempted to summarise life's fundamental tendency stating that the libido is symbol-seeking (Bonomi, 2004). We also believe that this is another way of saying that the “psychic symbol” is the result of a successful introjection, according to the teaching that Claude Nachin (1993) has drawn from the ideas of Nicolas Abraham.
In clinical practice, psychoanalysis tends to reconstruct the symbolic history of the individual (which is different from the biography of the individual), trying to identify the