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When a patient says that he knocks on wood three times before every car journey in order to prevent an accident, we do not conclude that he is exploiting an extraordinary kind of causality. When a patient announces that he is Jesus Christ, we do not marvel at a non-standard form of personal identity. But, according to Hanna Segal, when a patient explains that he will not play the violin in public because the performance would be tantamount to masturbation, we should understand that he is employing a peculiar kind of symbolism.
A symbol is one thing that represents another very different thing: for example, the Union Jack is a symbol of the United Kingdom, a particular ring is a symbol of a marriage, a rainbow can be regarded as a symbol of hope (the pot of gold). In ‘“The Importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego” in context’ (This Journal Vol. 24, No. 3, 1998), Segal repeats the claim made in her influential paper, ‘Notes on symbol formation’ , that there is a form of disturbed symbolization which consists in one thing being treated as identical to a very different thing. Her ‘elementary example’ of symbolic equation is: a doctor asks a schizophrenic patient in a mental hospital why he, the patient, has stopped playing the violin; and the patient replies, ‘Why?, do you expect me to masturbate in public?’ Segal asserts without argument that the patient equates violin with penis and playing the violin with masturbating. But there are outstanding questions. Is this schizophrenic patient incapable of sarcasm, or of angry contempt for what he has valued? Is the patient revealing a loss of competence by expressing his anxiety about being found out, about being the object of ridicule, about feeling shame? Evidently we must not construe the reply as a joke because it was made ‘with some violence’.1 Segal says that ‘the symbol-substitute is felt to be the original object. The substitute's own properties are not recognized or admitted’ . Really? How far doe