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The basic differences between pathological and normal, psychotic and neurotic processes are examined. Descriptive psychiatry has failed to establish a basis for such differentiation or classification; dynamic psychiatry has not succeeded either. 'It has become almost a fashion to substitute for this older and descriptive phrase the more pretentious words "interpersonal relations". Not only has this substitution added nothing to our understanding of the process; but the phrase itself has acquired question-begging implications in current debates over the relative roles of biological and cultural factors in the genesis of psychopathology.'
The author's investigation revolves round the nature of symbolic thinking. In all forms of human psychopathology there occur distortions of symbolic functions which cannot occur in the human infant before symbolic functioning begins. In animals too, the capability for symbolic thinking, feeling and behaviour is low. Can the concepts of neurosis and psychosis, the author asks, be applied to subhuman forms without introducing anthropomorphic fallacies? The investing of the infant's unmyelinated cerebrum with adult symbolic perceptions and fantasy formations leads into a world of science fiction. Presymbolic changes, however, may leave residual emotional disturbances and thus influence the acquisition of symbolic functions. It is the disturbance in the symbolic function itself which is examined in its relation to human psychopathology.
The word 'symbol' relates to three closely related processes which come under the general category of symbolic function and are discussed. The distinction between 'indirect representation' and 'symbolization' (Jones, Rappaport) is examined. Every moment of thought and feeling involves simultaneously the activation of the three uses of 'symbol'; the literal, the allegorical and the dreamlike. Unconscious symbols can be only one pole of a continuous spectrum. Every symbol refers to concepts which