Reflections on Image and Symbol

The nature and content of any particular image, especially if it appears in a dream or product of imagination, inevitably raises complex questions which would seem to be reflected in the protean use of the word symbol which, as Stein (1957, p. 74) points out, is derived from “… sym, i.e. σùv, which means “together, common, simultaneous, with, according to”, and bolon, i.e. “that which has been thrown”, from ballo (βáλλω)—'I throw'. “Symbol” thus means something perceptible which is the result of an activity which throws together such things as have something in common, and in such a way that one thing somehow accords with another not presented to the senses, and is synchronous with it.”

In spite of the difficulty of exact definition the question of whether an image be symbolic or not is an urgent one for any analyst to ask himself. He knows that the answer is significant in terms of psychic life, for symbols live, can be broken up, killed, or turned from good to evil by neglect or malusage. On the other hand, those that appear corrupted or evil can be revived or changed for the better, though once dead they cannot be brought back to life in the same form.

Lately the problem of symbolism has been raised in relation to the theory of sense perception, and has led to surprising and significant conclusions: the perceptual image, originally unquestioned by the ordinary man but disputed by the philosophers, has been broken up by scientific investigation so that the original naive experience of it as a direct, so to say, photographic image of the object no longer holds.

It has been discovered that the stimulated neurones in the brain form patterns on the cortex unlike the shape of the object under observation. This is almost all that the body is known to contribute to the apparently true conscious image of the external object (cf. Brain, 1951).

This image is called symbolic by neurophysiologists because it represents the external object closely enough for its existence to be es