The Growing Tree of Psychosemiotics: New Semiotics Completing Psychoanalysis and Semiotics: Keinänen M. Psychosemiosis as a Key to Body-Mind Continuum. The Reinforcement of Symbolization-Reflectiveness in Psychotherapy. New York:  Nova Science Publishers, 2006.

The Finnish psychiatrist and psychotherapist Matti Keinänen has developed a psychosemiotic theory of mind in which he describes the transition from biosemiotics—that is, spatial signs—to a temporal endo-semiotic state of flowing. This transition has the implication that signs that are originally physical become psychical. Keinänen's studies have been collected in a new book: Psychosemiosis as a key to body-mind continuum. The reinforcement of symbolization-reflectiveness in psychotherapy.

To Keinänen, the development of an inner dialog is the specific curative factor in psychotherapeutic treatment, especially with patients suffering from a borderline personality disorder. The task of the therapist is to develop a dialog aiming to increase patients' ability to think. This in its turn creates the basis for the person to experience that she or he is the subject of his other own self and, as a result of this development, also responsible as an autonomous individual.

According to Keinänen, the mind develops in therapy epigenetically from the indexical level towards an iconic and conventional symbolical level—toward the verbal-symbolic level. The ability to reflect and to symbolize makes man human, and these are “the instruments of human mind.” The continuity between the various forms of the symbol function is the “breathing of the human mind.” Keinänen regards the reflective-integrative capacity and its usage, the ability to perceive one's own and others' symbol function, as the precondition for psychic health. Keinänen locates the physical sensations from the outer and inner world, proprioceptive sensations, to the level of “firstness.” When these sensations are transformed into experience, the symbol function comes to the fore, meaning that the experienced reality is transformed to the “otherness,” which in its turn opens the way to even more consistent psychic experience and thinking—“a thirdness”—which makes it possible for the human mind to create new sceneries.

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