Language and the Emerging Symbol

This Paper looks at the development of the capacity to symbolise and the containing function of both symbols and language. My observations are based on the analysis of a three-year-old boy called Adam and illustrate the development of a process from a state of unintegration, in which neither language nor symbols were present, through to one in which the psychic opposites were contained and transformed.

In the initial stages of this process it was I, as the analyst, who acted as a container for the opposites in much the same way as a mother holds and transforms the intense emotions of an infant so that they are manageable for him and provide him with a model of ego functioning which he gradually introjects. Such experience can be seen as an essential precursor to symbolisation where it is the symbol which then acts as the container.

For Jung, a symbol is something which emerges spontaneously from the psyche as the best possible expression for that which is as yet unknown and mysterious. It refers both to the conscious rational sphere and the irrational unconscious sphere, thus expressing the totality of the psyche. This two-fold nature of the symbol means that it can never be fully explained in a rational sense since it has a complexity of meaning which extends from the personal individual experience to the collective, universal and archetypal experience. Jung regarded the symbol as a transformer of energy and the means by which differentiated consciousness could be attained. He saw it as not only an expression of intrapsychic processes but something which can exert an effect on the psyche, uniting the psychic opposites and restoring the balance between the ego and the unconscious.

Jung speaks of the need for an individual to be in touch with infantile feelings right down to the level of the most primitive instincts as well as with the collective nature of his psyche. In relation to children Jung comments, ‘Because a child is physically small and its conscio