Σύμβoλoν: An Attempt Toward the Early Origins, Part 1

Introduction

One of the main aims of this paper is try to clarify the vexata quæstio on symbolism, its nature and origins. Our original motivation for this comes from mathematics and its role in the sciences: following Eugene P. Wigner (1960), how does one explain the effectiveness2 of this formal and abstract language in natural sciences, like physics? The history of mathematics unfortunately comprises many cases of great mathematicians who have had alternating severe psychotic states with moments of normality and that, out of respect of them we do not quote here.3 Now, mathematics intimately relies on symbolic and segnic function, so that it may shed light on these typical human features. Due to this, we would like to put forward the hypothesis according to which the symbolic function might be the outcome of the dialectic interplay between two concomitant Ego's subagencies always present in every human being which, in turn, would be the outcome of an Ego's splitting mainly according to the Freudian (1938, 1949, 1999) thought based on disavowal mechanism4 and supported by the thoughts of other authors, above all H. Nunberg, D. Lagache and J. Lacan. Our hypotheses are historiographically supported by a considerable research literature which we have taken into account in drawing up this paper. The theoretical framework here outlined will turn out to be of some usefulness to explain, from a psychodynamics perspective, other already existent ideas on mathematical thought from a more properly cognitive viewpoint, like those based on embodied mathematics. Indeed, just this last perspective will be much more coherent with

what herein is established which, among other things, is based on the notion of bodily image, with related phenomena, as formed from the psychodynamics viewpoint. In this first part, we retrace the main theories on symbolism from a psychodynamics standpoint as well as outline the main psychodynamics elements underlying the notion of Ego's splitting upon which we will build our framework. In the second part, we will apply what herein is said to mathematical and physical contexts. From our discussion, it will turn out that a primary role is played by the formation of bodily image also as regards the general symbolism theory because, for instance, it may explain the possible origin of syntactic and semantic structures thanks to the possible relations established amongst its component elements together with the possible meanings assigned to them. In short, our main idea around which revolves this two-part paper is as follows. Putting the disavowal mechanism as a general psychic mechanism, its outcomes are some basic subagencies of Ego agency, to be precise the Ideal Ego subagency and the agency system Ego's Ideal – Super-Ego, from whose dialectic interaction takes place most of psychic life, including symbolic function as well as degenerative behaviours. In particular, the disavowal is closely involved in the bodily image formation which takes place during the well-determined pregenital phases of human psychosexual development (mainly, from the anal phase to the Œdipus one) in the discovery of the primary sexual gender difference from which the child, when she/he gives pre-eminence to symbolic elaboration, is able to build up her or his personal bodily image, instituting relations (syntax) between its component elements together with the assignment of related meanings (semantics). In such a way, the child acquires her or his own syntactic and semantic tasks and abilities moulded according to her or his strong emotional experience in seeing and discovering the external realities given by the sexual apparatuses of both sexes put in reciprocal comparison. In doing so, it will therefore be possible to account for the inseparable5 relationships between syntax and semantics (at least, in normality) as well as to explain consequent and fascinating relationships between mathematics and physics. The paper is therefore devoted to debating on this main idea.

First Historical Outlines on Symbolism

According to Eco (1981) and Petocz (2004), to date, it is not entirely clear what the unambiguous origins of the symbolic function of human thought are, although various explanatory theories have been proposed to this purpose. In this regard, Eco claims that the concept of symbol is epitomizable as a kind of “content's nebula”, mainly because of its polysemic nature. According to semiotic theory, a symbol falls into the wider class of signs (according to T. Todorov, 1982a, 1982b). From this perspective, then, U. Eco defines a sign as anything that can be taken as “significantly substituting” for something else, or rather, a sign is something (whether a natural or an artificial object) which stands in place of something that is absent. Historically, the semiotic perspective broadly goes from C. S. Peirce to F. de Saussure, K. Bühler and R. Jakobson (see Todorov, 1982a, 1982b). Peirce gave the first, famous tripartite division of the sign in icon, index and symbol, the last being the case in which the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary; thus, the major systematic manifestation of symbols is in language. In contrast, F. de Saussure held that it is the sign which is arbitrary, and the symbol which is not arbitrary or “motivated” and so does not properly belong to the field of semiotics. Therefore, according to de Saussure, the symbol is no longer a kind of sign, the affect starting to be a fundamental element in characterizing it, so making the set of symbols

different from the set of signs; both sets are overlapping one with another, the symbol being sometimes opposed to the sign, other times classified as a sign. This separation of domains, mainly due to the occurrence of the emotional-affective element, gives rise to two main entities, namely those of conventional symbols (the signs) and non-conventional symbols (those not classified as signs). The continuous slipping back and forth between them is the main feature of that vexata quæstio of the dualism between sign and symbol; in turn, the latter often refers to another crucial question, that of the conscious versus the unconscious nature of symbols. There is no doubting the fact that conventional symbols are entirely conscious, whereas strong disputes exist regarding the nature of non-conventional symbols. It is almost a matter of fact that the latter have a double unconscious and conscious nature, so that the critical point relies on the possible relationships between them. With Peirce and de Saussure, a prominent role is played by the relation between signifier and signified, the primary form of symbol being given by metaphor. Later, these last perspectives will be compared with the psychoanalytic ones, above all with Lacan's work. In this paper, we simply want to put forward the possible hypothesis according to which the fundamental Freudian disavowal mechanism, together with the consequent splitting of Ego's agency, might be considered to underlie the possible early origins of this fundamental function which essentially characterizes (according to E. Cassirer) all the normal and pathological human thought functions. A theory of symbol should be considered first from a psychoanalytic perspective, contrarily to a theory of sign which mainly pertains to the cognitive context, all this, in turn, referring to the primary distinction between conventional symbols and non-conventional ones. Only after having given a psychoanalytic basis will it be possible to consider a more cognitive viewpoint built up on the former; these two perspectives are often closely intertwined with each other. In this paper, we want to start just from the first psychoanalytical paradigm, the Freudian one, which epistemologically lies at the heart of every further psychoanthropological trend (according to C.G. Jung, M. Klein, J. Lacan, C. Lévi-Strauss, etc.).

Disavowal, Fantasy and Phantasy

The primary aim of this work is to put the disavowal process, considered as a fundamental universal psychic mechanism (d'après Anna Freud and others), at the basis of symbolic function. In pursuing this, as we will see later, the various already existent theories on symbolism could, in turn, get a more coherent and systematic classification if laid out within this framework based on the disavowal mechanism. According to the last Freudian thought, delineated in his last work7 in 1938 and which starts with the analysis of fetishism, disavowal might be contemplated as a possible universal psychic mechanism which nevertheless, in some cases, might give rise to degenerations in paraphilia. We here follow a suggestion by J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis (1973) according to which disavowal might be considered a general psychic mechanism involved in the formation and development of every human being, although this idea has already been considered by other authors, like Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. To be precise, disavowal has been considered a fundamental mechanism in the formation and structuration of the Ego agency, which is the one that presides in all the secondary psychic processes and relationships with reality. Following Rycroft (1968a), in

psychoanalysis the imagination is included in the realm of fantasy, where it forms a domain in itself, called phantasy according to English terminology. Therefore, phantasy is meant to be an imaginative activity which is at the basis of every human thought and sentiment. Each psychoanalytic trend agrees in considering the conscious mental activity as supported, accompanied, maintained, animated and influenced by unconscious fantasy which starts in childhood, has primarily and originally to do with biological relationships and processes, and gives rise to symbolic elaboration (see ). Above all, the Kleinian school assumes unconscious fantasy to be an unavoidable means between instinct and thought (see Segal, , ). Likewise, the orthodox Freudian theory locates fantasy into the Id. Furthermore, it is a general statement that (creative) imaginative activity entails the participation of a non-verbal unconscious fantasy (see Beres, , ). According to Isaacs , fantasies are the primary content of mental unconscious processes, while unconscious fantasies (understood as the primary content of unconscious mental processes) primarily concern the body and represent the instinctual aims toward the representation of objects. These fantasies are, in the first place, the psychic representatives of libidinal and aggressive instincts. The adaptation to reality and the secondary process require the support of concomitant unconscious fantasies. All that shall justify what will be said later.

On Ego's Splitting: First Outlines

Through a rapid analysis of the psychoanalytic literature on fetishism (see also Khan Masud, 1970, 1979), it will turn out that in the fetish formation process the first forms of condensation and displacement mechanisms take place, which are the two main psychodynamic processes underlying any symbolic formation. In the following, fetish formation will be compared too with that of the transitional object. Their paths meet frequently, until they become different to each other with psychic maturation, distinguishing between two possible choices, namely normality and pathology (perversions8). However, these two entities, fetish and transitional object, have many common points amongst them in the first stages of human psychosexual development. At the same time, according to the last 1938 Freudian thought, an Ego's splitting with the formation of two subagencies takes place, which will be called Ego's Ideal and Ideal Ego (see Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1975). Nevertheless, both these names are due to Hermann Nunberg (1932) and Daniel Lagache (1961) and not to Sigmund Freud who explicitly introduced and used only the name Ego's Ideal in his 1914 work On Narcissism to denote an autonomous intrapsychic formation to which the Ego refers itself to evaluate its effective realizations or representations (see Galimberti, 2006). Nevertheless, Freud himself, in the On Narcissism (of 1914) as well as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (of 1922) and The Ego and the Id (of 1923) speaks too of an Ideal Ego (Idealich) but identifies it with the Ego's Ideal (Ichideal) and this, in turn, with the Super-Ego, even if in some points of his discussion a certain distinction between them seemed already to be possible. The Ego's Ideal has narcissistic origins going back to the primary identification and which precede all further object relations. Such a narcissistic state is lost thanks to parents criticisms toward the child. The interiorization of such criticisms gives rise to agencies of self-observation. Subsequently, other authors, such as H. Nunberg (1932, , ), J. Lacan and D. Lagache , retook two such Ego's agencies as distinct from each other. On the other hand, as already said above,

Some Epistemological Considerations

The general epistemological problematic concerning the psychoanalytic disciplines and their foundations is well known to be complex and intricate, and is included in the wider problematic concerning the long-standing difficult relationships between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften (d'après W. Dilthey). According to Caramelli9 (1984, 1985) and Carotenuto (1982), every psychological theory is the result of the subjective and individual experience of its author, so that each of these will represent aspects of psychic reality that might elude others (gnoseological relativism). Therefore, only the whole composite framework made by all the possible theories of psyche will provide, at a given historical moment, a certain knowledge framework of human psyche. Thus, psychoanalysis also has a deep historicist10 and pluralistic dimension as a doctrine's field (which we might call a historicist gnoseological relativism), and, hence, we may use different theoretical frameworks to coherently explain a given psychic phenomenon without meeting contradictions. In this sense, we could use in a concomitant manner elements of different authors’ theories, provided that the minimal requisites of non-contradiction and coherence are respected. On the other hand, in some respects, this last relativistic and opportunistic epistemological stance is much nearer to the last epistemological anarchism ideas of P. Feyerabend (see Abbagnano, 1998) that the author himself would want to consider as related to a general gnoseological method. In this paper, for instance, we will mainly follow the last Freudian thought as exposed in Freud (1938, 1949, 1999), but, at the same time, we will refer to many other thoughts systems which may have relationships (of coherence, analogy, confirmation, support, integration or completion) with the main ideas herein exposed and mainly based on the Freudian disavowal mechanism. However, a beautiful and emblematic example of the validity and application of this epistemological stance is provided by the same Jacques Lacan's theory which is an almost unique systematic and organic framework making harmonic and coherent use of different theories like anthropology, linguistic, literature, arts, etc., as well as the thought system of many other authors.

On Symbolism: First Considerations

On Etymological Meaning

According to Abbagnano (1998) and Galimberti (2006), the word symbol derives from the Greek noun σ ύ μ β o λ o ν (with Latin transliteration sӯMmbolum), this from σ ύ μ β ă λ λ ω in turn derived from the verb σ ν μ β á λ λ ε ι ν (with Latin transliteration sým bállein) which, in composition, means “throw together”. It is characterized, like the sign, by an a priori postponement which, on the one hand, includes

the symbol in the sign's order as a specific case of it (as a conventional symbol), whereas, on the other hand, it is opposed to the sign itself because the latter has a predetermined relationship with what it denotes or connotes (aliquid stat pro aliquo11), whereas the symbol, instead, in evoking its corresponding part, refers to a given reality which is not decided by some form of convection but by the recomposition or assembling of a whole (in respect of its original etymological meaning, as a non-conventional symbol). Roughly speaking, there is no rigid link between a symbol and what it symbolizes. Nevertheless, the relationships between sign and symbol are never well delineated in a clear manner. The psychoanalytic perspective might yet provide useful clarifications, above all that of the Kleinian trend and that of the British middle group headed by Donald W. Winnicott, if one takes into account the early etymological meaning of the term “symbol” (see also Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973), i.e., the one that refers to the “assembling of a set of things”. Following Petocz (2004), which quotes a Lévi-Strauss consideration, the concept of meaning is so difficult to define perhaps because of its intimate reciprocal connection with the notion of symbol. On the other hand, the noun σ ύ μ β o λ o ν, i.e., a “tally”, originally referred to each of the two corresponding pieces of some small object which contracting parties broke between them and kept as proof of identity when rejoined together.12 That meaning subsequently expanded to include a diversity of meaning such as other kinds of tokens, seal, contract, sign, code, etc. In this regard, see also Laplanche and Pontalis .

On Interpretation and Symbolism: A First Sight

For our purposes, it is fundamental to sketchily consider the essence of the conception of symbol from the semiotic stance. Indeed, according to Eco, the symbol is considered as a “decision”, since the symbolic world always and everywhere presupposes an invention's process applied to a recognition, i.e., one finds an element which might assume, or has already assumed, segnic function, and decides, then, to see it as the projection of a portion having a sufficiently imprecise content. On the other hand, following Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), when one speaks of mathematical or linguistic symbols, any reference to a natural relationship or to an analogical correspondence is excluded, that is to say, the typical segnic denotation or connotation relation (for instance, in the Ferdinand de Saussure meaning) does not hold for them: to show a very elementary algebraic example, the following relation among integers, (a + b)^p = a^P + b^P, may have completely different symbolic13 meanings depending on whether it refers to the set of integers ℤ or to the set of congruence classes modulo p, namely ℤ_p (p ≥ 2). Therefore, its meaning depends on the given contextual interpretation, as we will see later. Following Rycroft (1968a, 1968b), in psychoanalytic theory a sign points out the presence of something more or less directly identifiable, whereas a symbol refers to something different from what it is. The importance of a symbol derives just from that something

else in which it puts off, which is reachable only through a suitable interpretation. Signs directly reveal their meaning, whereas symbols require a kind of decoding through a correct interpretation. This is the main difference between sign and symbol, which is emphasized only within the classical psychoanalytic theory while in other contexts (cf. Peirce's theory of sign) such a distinction is more elusive. From our point of view, if one wants, for example, to try to explain why mathematics is a suitable interpretative language for natural sciences, it is not possible to prescind from the psychoanalytic perspective on symbolism. Indeed, whilst the connection between the sign and the thing to which it refers has a conscious nature, the symbol establishes an unconscious replacement, through displacement and condensation, of an image, an idea or an activity with another. This last viewpoint will be clearer later when we discuss C. Rycroft's work. Moreover, for further discussion on mathematical symbolism, see the second part of this paper.

Some Linguistic Aspects

However, we are not interested here in all the theories on symbolism14 but only in those which, in a certain sense, might be explained through (or correlated to) the line of thought that we wish to delineate in this paper, i.e., the one centred on the Freudian disavowal mechanism. Namely, we will consider those theories according to which the symbol is considered to be different from the sign, both in the lack of a conventional and rigid order which sets up the possible signifier-signified relationships (according to de Saussure) and in the fact that the symbol is conscious whereas the symbolized is unconscious. Nevertheless, in what will follow, the comparisons between segnic and symbolic functions will be frequent, since their domains are inseparable although distinct from one another, as already said in the previous sections. From our point of view, we consider the symbolic function as preceding the segnic one, and having deep unconscious roots; the latter, then, will start from the former.15 Our intention, therefore, is to focus on the first, ancestral nucleus of such a symbolic function, whose early origins we would want to bring back to certain crucial aspects of the last 1930s Freudian thought (see Freud, 1938, 1949, 1999) on human psychic evolution. Following Rycroft (1968a, 1968b), E. Jones was one of the first scholars of symbolism from the orthodox viewpoint. According to him, symbolism is always the result of an intrapsychic conflict between the repressing tendencies and the repressed material. Only those repressed objects that cannot be sublimated need to be symbolized, so there is a close relationship between the sublimation processes and the symbolization. Nevertheless, Freud himself wasn't so radical in considering symbolism as exclusively confined to the primary process as Jones was. Indeed, in his last work in 1938, Freud reached the conclusion that the linguistic symbols used in dreams have mainly an unconscious meaning and originate during the earliest language development stages. So, Freud presumed that the symbolic function was in some respects correlated with the formation of the verbal linguistic one.

On Psychoanalytic Symbolism

According to Segal (1991), it is not possible even minimally to approach the subject of fantasy (hence, of creativity) and of dreaming without considering the unconscious symbolism; this is because both are closely intertwined and interconnected between them. Freud distinguished between a conscious symbolism (such as a metaphor) and an unconscious one. Again following Rycroft (1968a, 1968b)16 and Segal (1991), within the Ernest Jones framework on symbolism there is a close connection between the sublimation process and symbolic formation, which is the pivotal key to understanding any creative process, the latter being present where the former is missing. According to Jones, there are some main features of symbolism, namely: (i) the symbolic process is completely unconscious; (ii) each symbol represents ideas of Self and of the own family, as well as birth, love and death phenomena; (iii) each symbol has a constant meaning and is the result of an intrapsychic conflict between the repressing tendencies and the repressed material; (iv) only the repressed material needs to be symbolized; and, finally, (v) the emotional charge which invests the symbolized object has not been able enough to perform that qualitative modification given by sublimation. Therefore, according to Jones, symbols have nothing to do with sublimation. However, many points of Jones's theory of symbolism have been reworked out, amongst others by Melanie Klein, loosening their strong constraining character. As already said in the previous sections, even Freud wasn't as rigid about symbolism as Jones was, for instance allowing many possible meanings for the same symbol. Freud himself, then, was aware that at the basis of dream and artistic activity was unconscious fantasy, hence symbolic thought. Sublimation is a psychic process provided by Freud for trying to explain the higher human thought functions, thereafter counted as a general defence mechanism by his daughter Anna Freud (1937),17 and yet quite neglected by psychoanalysis which has not still given a coherent theory of it (see ). Given the close relationships of sublimation with secondary processes, perhaps it would be possible to bring back the segnic function to the sublimation process rather than the symbolic one whose process is quite different from the former, albeit both are intertwined with one another. For instance, according to Rycroft (, ), symbolization and sublimation are two psychic processes which have displacement as a common energetic exchange mechanism. Rycroft states that sublimation is considered to be strictly related to scopophilia (roughly speaking, the pleasure of watching, one of the basic childish drives, from which derives the so-called (see ), or else, general human intellectual activity is a sublimation of this, which follows from childhood inhibitions of sexual curiosities. Moreover, according to the author, all sublimations depend on symbolization, while all the Ego's development depends on sublimation. In turn, the splitting process (upon which is also based disavowal) has mainly to do with the Ego's development. In short, from what has been said so far, it is evident that there are links between the symbolism and sublimation processes and human psychosexual development. In this paper, on the basis of what has just been said, we would like to point out some possible relationships between the symbolic function and the disavowal mechanism, the latter supposed to be, Laplanche and Pontalis , a general psychic formation process (closely related to Ego's structuration) not only relegated to pathology, as already Freud himself had hypothesized in his last notable

On the Viewpoints of Charles Rycroft and Hanna Segal

Charles Rycroft (1968b) gave a useful and original interpretation of symbolism. This is neither a hereditary18 nor exclusive prerogative of the unconscious realm. The symbols are the outcomes of a cathexis displacement from the images of the objects of primary interest (like those involved in the primary identification) to the images of objects perceived in the external world. Once formed, a symbol may be used either by primary or secondary processes. When a symbol is used by a primary process, its meaning becomes independent from the object that it originally represented; hence, it will be involved in fantastic processes, like neuroses and dreams. When, instead, a symbol is used by a secondary process, it will continue to represent a suitable object of the external world and will become part of conscious and unconscious imaginative processes that promote the development of a certain sense of reality. Rycroft follows Melanie Klein and Isaacs (1952) in assuming that the sense of reality is supported and favoured by fantasy. Rycroft distinguishes between fantasy that intensifies reality and fantasy that maintains illusory (or neurotic) substitutes for reality. To the first, he gives the specific name of imagination, which is a fundamental component to evaluate reality. According to Rycroft (who, in turn, starts from the previous work on symbolism of L. S. Kubie and M. Milner – see Rycroft, 1968b), the words are classified as symbols closely related to consciousness that favour the secondary processes. The words are also closely related to object relations because verbalization is a form of communication between objects. On the other hand, within the Kleinian framework, Hanna Segal (1991) also made further and original contributions to symbolism (see also Bott et al., 2011). On the basis of her clinical material drawn from the analytic treatment of psychotic patients, she identified two main symbolic functions. The first function is called symbolic equation and relies on the basis of concrete schizophrenic thought: in it, the symbol is equated with the symbolized object, up to the point where it is lived as identical to the latter. In this regard, Segal refers to a clinical case in which a psychotic patient, at a certain moment in his life, broke off to play the violin; when he was asked why, he curtly replied: “Do you want maybe that I publicly masturbate?” Now, playing a violin has the psychoanalytic meaning of masturbation, so that, for him, a violin is a penis, so that playing a violin masturbating and therefore it cannot be done in public. The intuition of the second function, however, came from a clinical case regarding a neurotic. It has been called and has to do with the true symbolism of normal thought. Through it, the symbol represents the object but must not be entirely equated to it. If one dreams of playing a violin, then the violin, yes, represents the penis, but distinguished from it, so that one may personify unconscious fantasies of masturbation and, at the same time, remain quite distinguished to use the violin to play in such a manner to separately represent a sexual act. The passage from the first function to the second one is well illustrated by a clinical case treated by Claudine Geissman (see ) and references therein) in regard to a psychotic eight-years-old girl who initially wasn't able even to speak but rather was only interested in everything that had a spherical form, as well as showing aggressiveness and violence toward everybody and everything which resembled a human being (like dolls, etc.). By means of the transfer of the child to an analyst, Geissman stated that such objects were the concrete counterparts of maternal

On the Development of Freudian Libido: A Brief Sketch

Herein, for completeness and for giving a semblance of organic unity to the whole treatment, we briefly outline the main points of Freudian psychosexual development, with slight additions and contributions due to other authors which must be understood according to the above-mentioned epistemological considerations.

On Object Relationships

The strong instinctual reduction due to homination (that is to say, the passage from primates to the genus Homo), gave rise to the human existential problem of managing the consequent instinctual energy content which has supervened as a result of such a drive deconstrainment. The human being is characterized, as well as by needs, by desire which is roughly meant as a sort of incoercible psychic tension which has to be necessarily, internally or externally invested. So, for the human being, it is indispensable to find objects21 upon which to direct, or to invest, such an energy content. The consequent relations established with these objects (animated or not) are generically called object relationships. These were explicitly introduced by post-Freudians, first of all by the Melanie Klein school, even if the notion of object relation was already present, in nuce, in the Freudian notion of cathexis of a drive (or instinct) which characterizes the inescapable human disposition to make interrelationships with something else (which belongs to the external or own internal world), said to be the cathexis object, which, in turn, will be represented by the individual in various manners. The Freudian cathexis has a source, an object and a drive destination (or instinctual aim) as fundamental constitutive elements. The first one is the (bodily) zone, or the somatic apparatus, in which the related libido excitation takes place and originates. The second one is the means by which or with which the drive may reach its (instinctual) aim. It is the necessary correlative of the drive destination, and is mainly determined by the personal history (above all, infantile) of the individual but constitutionally is quite undetermined since it may be either a person or a partial real or fantasmatic object. Finally, the third one is that particular and necessary activity, or that specific action, due to the push of the drive itself to obtain the given satisfaction, and that often is oriented and sustained by the fantasmatic or imaginative elaboration of the individual herself or himself. Hence, we sketchily have

These last notions are the generalization of the correlative ones of sexuality: for instance, the object corresponds to the sexual object, that is to say, the person who exerts the sexual attraction, while the aim corresponds to the sexual satisfaction, that is to say, it is the action due to, or raised by, drive pushes. The first (bodily) Ego formations mainly involve a correct balancing of the primary narcissism, a regulation of primary identifications (through introjection-projection mechanisms), and a beginning of a sense of reality and of a corporal image of Self.

The Psychosexual Development

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (of 1905), besides outlining the above notion of object cathexis, Freud worked out the main lines of his celebrated theory on the stadial or phasic development of human sexuality which is meant to be mainly driven by the agency of Id (or Es), which is understood as the place of all the instincts ruled by the principle of pleasure. According to him, human sexuality22 starts at birth (if not before, in the prenatal phase) with two main stages, the pre-Œdipus stage, from birth to about four years old, and the stage, from about five years old to about seven years old, to carry on with the phase, from about eight years old to about twelve years old, hence with (or the from about thirteen years old to about fifteen years old, ending with from about sixteen years old to about eighteen years old. In turn, the pre-Œdipus stage includes: a first phase, from birth to about one year old, in which the somatic Ego begins to form with the recognition of the first partial objects together the establishment of the incorporation's instinct; an phase, from about the first year to about two years old, in which a self-erotic narcissistic attitude prevails – it begins to express the first ambivalence phenomena and to structure the basic tasks of restraining and expelling faeces; a phase, from about two years old to

On Phallic Phase

For our aims, it is important to further highlight other aspects of the phallic phase. As already said above, in the phallic phase the organization of genital pleasure prevails and there are predominant interests in the sensitivity of those organs whose functionality is particularly present from about three years old to about five years old. From this period hereafter, no matter what their possible origins, this excitation is focused and invested on the genitals, the sexuality being lived only in a self-erotic manner. In this phase, the drives revolve around the crucial question of having or not having the phallus (in its highest symbolic meaning) which is the main reference point and drive orientation line for both sexes. It is the central executive organ of the whole libido: for instance, it will be the high unit of the genital function which melts in itself all the partial drives coming from the various erogenous zones25. This last phenomenon has been called erotic anfimix by S. Ferenczi (see Nunberg, 1932, 1955, 1975). But, in this period, ithe first notions of

space and time also begin to form,26 which also assist the formation of the corporal scheme, notwithstanding their categories are still not well defined from the logical viewpoint. Furthermore, in this phase, not all children are able to identify gender genital differences, although this phase is mainly focused on seeing and hearing in order to identify the possible cathexis objects of desire, remembering these through their symbolic meanings. In this phase, children develop the narcissistic conviction that there exists a unique genital organ, the phallus, which they attribute, to every human being, no matter their sex, and even to inanimate objects (see Nunberg, , , ). Children are unable to imagine human beings as devoid of a phallus, which is understood as a mere narcissistic pleasure organ. Such a prevalence of the image of the phallus as a symbolic representation of the potential of pleasure is also interpretable as a between psychosomatic-emotive experiences and psychomental ones ruled by logical thought. Therefore, the psychosomatic aspects, which manage the emotions, act too as a support for the subsequent logical thought functions and for the exchange of affects. As already said, in this phase children are persuaded that only one genital organ exists, the phallus, noting too that there exist only the castrated and the not castrated, so coming on to configure the which has an archetypical

The Freudian Disavowal Mechanism and Fetishism: Brief Outlines

First Historical Outlines on Disavowal

Following Roudinesco , Freud, for the first time, used the term negation or denegation31 (Verneinung) in 1917 after a personal re-elaboration of the term negative hallucination due to H. Bernheim following his 1914 reclassification of psychoses, neuroses and perversions based on castration theory made in On Narcissism: An Introduction. The term was then explicitly used by Freud in 1925. By Verneinung Freud meant a verbal mechanism through which the repressed material is recognized in a negative manner by the subject, but without being accepted. Together with this mechanism, Freud also used the term disavowal (Verleugnung) to indicate the refusal, by the subject, to recognize the reality of a negative perception, like the lack of a female penis. The Verneinung is connected to a mechanism typical of neuroses, whereas the Verleugnung is connected to a mechanism typical of perversions. Finally, according to Freud, the Verdrängung is a term which indicates a mechanism related to repression. Thereafter, in the Wolf Man (of 1914), Freud also used the term Verwerfung to indicate

the rejection of a reality presented as non-existent, and to be meant as distinct from the previous ones. In France, there were some heated debates about the relations of the term scotomization, first proposed by E. Pichon-Rivière in 1928 to indicate an unconscious mechanism through which a subject makes disappear from the consciousness those facts which are unpleasant, with the previous terms. For instance, R. Laforgue proposed consideration of scotomization as comprising either the Verleugnung and another repression mechanism typical of psychoses, whilst Freud considered it as distinct both from Verleugnung and Verdrängung. Laforgue wanted to indicate an annulment of a perception whilst Freud wished to keep the perception within a framework supported by negation, that is to say, not complete closure of a perception in front of a misunderstanding of reality, but rather activation of a perception put between a denegation and a repression. In a nutshell, the real problem consisted in the lack of a specific term to indicate the rejection mechanism typical of psychoses. In short, even Freud had a certain moment of uncertainty between all these terms, (disavowal), (repression) and (negation), in relation to psychosis mechanisms. Finally, as we will see later, Freud opted for denegation or disavowal. (or of the reality), is a term that Sigmund Freud began to explicitly use, in a specific sense, after the paper entitled (of 1925), until it attained a more general sense in the last of his works, namely (see ), even if such a primary notion did not have a definitive characterization, for which reason it will be retaken by his followers to be studied more deeply. According to Octave Mannoni, Freud began to implicitly use the notion of disavowal after the 1890s in discussing the concept of splitting the Ego, both these notions being closely related to one another. As stated above, disavowal is different both from negation and from repression ( as will become clear later. Following the last Freudian ideas exposed in Freud (, , ), we may consider disavowal as a fundamental psychic mechanism which relies on the primary basis of any other possible relation with the external reality. Indeed, in this last work of his, Freud fully re-examined all his previous ideas about the Ego agency and its functions in the light of the fundamental psychic process of Ego's splitting. Freud (, , ) also states that a certain degree of fetishism is part of normality, particularly during romantic love. The above-mentioned Freudian work (of 1925) has played a primary role in subsequent studies on consciousness. Following De Mijolla , negation dramatizes a situation of interpretative conflict and is related to a dialogical situation. Negation, unknown at the level of the unconscious, needs to be situated on a secondary level, and we can gain access to it only by way of the symbol. The study of the interrelation between oral instinctual motions and the establishment of negative and affirmative behaviour has been further investigated in the works of R. A. Spitz . Then, following Akhtar and O'Neil , any elementary content,

Towards the Ego's Splitting

The 1927 Freudian paradigm of fetishism, which was initially laid down to explain the formation of fetishes by means of castration anxiety due to the observation of the lack of a female penis, has gone beyond the context of sexuality, due to the rigour with which it was formulated by Freud himself. Subsequently, such a paradigm underwent further improvements until a definitive 1938 model centred around the basic notion of Ego's splitting (see Freud, 1938, 1949, 1999). According to the latter, most people overcome such a castration complex through symbolic elaboration,36 accepting the gender sexual differences, whereas those who do not overcome such a complex will have neurotic developments with possible paraphilic degeneration (see also Piscicelli, 1994). In

fetishism, the perception that disproves the infant's belief in a female penis is not rejected but is, as some say, displaced upon an object, the fetish. It therefore does not imply a hallucination or an alteration of the representation of reality (like in psychoses), but simply it repudiates the reality. After having detected the lack of a female penis, the child has, in a certain sense, modified its initial belief about the female penis, retaining it and, at the same time, abandoning it (Aufgegeben). He or she believes that, despite everything, the female has a penis, even if this is no longer that of before, because something has taken its place or replaced it, that is to say, it has been named a “symbolic substitute” for it upon which it will be possible to cathexis the desire to avoid the strong anxiety's pressures due to the castration principle. But, in doing so, the child inevitably goes into a conflict created by the load of the real undesired perception of a penis lack against the force of a counter-desire opposed to this, thereby reaching a basic ambivalence whose resolutive compromise will be possible only thanks to the action of the unconscious thought which dialectically operates through its own primary processes. In short, the fetish is, yes, a symbolic substitute for the phallus, but it is not always an iconic reproduction of it. Such a fetish reflects, at the same time, the denial and the affirmation of the female castration, this also corresponding to the coexistence of two opposite attitudes in respect of the fetish, which Freud tries to explain by means of a particular psychic mechanism, called This splitting takes place when the child undergoes a conflict between the initial instinct's claim and the objection made by reality ( but does not choose either one or the other, or else chooses both. In such a manner, the formation of the Ego's synthetic function is perturbed. Thus, to sum up, a fundamental characteristic of fetishism is that it allows reality to be recognized and, at the same time, disclaimed. It gives rise to the fundamental creation of opposites whose separation, thanks to this splitting mechanism (if correctly operating), is at the basis of first consciousness formation. Such a mechanism, however, is different from the psychotic one because the latter is a mere and simple repudiation of the reality which is never recognized. Nevertheless, the (paraphilic) fetishist cannot avoid a degenerative Ego splitting when this splitting does not give rise to that compensative symbolic elaboration recalled above.

From Fetishism to Ego's Splitting

On Ego's Splitting, Fetishism and Transitional Phenomena

By means of the disavowal mechanism, Freud glimpses the origins of an intrasystemic Ego's splitting40 (Ichspaltung) through which, within the Ego agency, two distinct and conflictual psychic attitudes take place of which one takes into account the reality denied by the other, and substitutes it with the content of a desire. Or else, following Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), through this intrapsychic division, an Ego's splitting takes place both

into a part which observes and into a part which is observed. This last perspective is widely but implicitly used by Freud in his final works, above all to denote a certain dichotomic or separated nature of human psyche. Throughout this paper, when we refer to the notion of Ego's splitting, we mean this last perspective, coherently with the Freudian work in which such a notion starts to be used with the celebrated works Fetishism (of 1927), Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence (of 1938) and in Abriβ der Psychoanalyse (see Freud, 1938). Above all, we will follow the Freudian thought of this last work. According to Freud, disavowal would allow us to explain the typical features of psychoses and fetishism. Following Galimberti , as stated above, the original 1925 Freudian concept of disavowal was extended to all the painful perceptions that, being in contrast with the pleasure principle, lead to not recognizing the reality, transforming it in a hallucinatory manner to satisfy the desire. Hence, disavowal is a very fundamental psychic mechanism which has to do with the external reality, and whose main result is this Ego's splitting. It is the first psychic agency to form for detecting reality. The Ego's splitting is a basic psychic mechanism preliminary to others, like introjective and projective identification, etc. Following Greenacre , in the formation of Ego's agency, a remarkable role is played by pre-Œdipus phases. In the 1930s, there was a considerable need for a deeper knowledge of Ego. In this regard, the author, thanks to her professional psychiatrist activity, had the opportunity to examine many clinical cases of psychosis which turned out to be of great usefulness just to study the Ego's function. After the studies of W. Hoffer, P. Schilder, M. Ribble, M. E. Fries, R. A. Spitz and M. S. Mahler, it had been possible to ascertain that the first formations of this agency are of a corporal or somatic nature (bodily Ego). Greenacre herself (and B. Lantos) pointed out a certain primitive predisposition to anxiety, mainly related to the elaboration of primal scenes, which will play a notable role in the Ego's formation, if properly cathexed, together its next splitting. According to Greenacre, the classical 1927 and 1938 Freudian works on fetishism were the best ones on fetishism and perversions. In these works, Freud foregrounds the Ego's splitting which takes place in consequence of the strong castration anxiety when a child has recognized the gender sexual differences. Above all, the kid refuses to recognize the reality of this painful situation. Nevertheless, he assigns a penis to his mother, symbolically represented by the fetish (material or merely symbolic) whose specific form is largely due to the displacement of that energetic amount which has been determined in concomitance with the appearance of castration anguish. The fetish formation must therefore provide these incongruities in the corporal image formation through suitable surrogates. These may be physical parts of the body (material fetish) or may be abstract formations like more or less complex fantasies (see ). The pathological cases mainly take place during the passage from the normal childish fetish of three-to four-year-olds to the latency phase, characterized by the deterioration of the capacity to establish object relations. In Greenacre , the author contributed further interesting considerations on fetishism. According to her, the fetish has mainly a phallic meaning, but also a bisexual one. Fetishism is a disorder which is mainly due to an imperfect development of corporal image and of the bodily Ego, from which derive disorders of reality sense, of identity sense and of object relations. The adult's fetish has something in common with the Winnicott childhood's which, usually, has a certain role in the constitution and development of the reality and of the object relation, and concerns both sexes. The formation of a transitional object takes place within the so-called (Winnicott-Spitz) which is the space

On Ego's Ideal and Ideal Ego

Following Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), Freud, as mentioned above, put disavowal as the main psychic mechanism involved in the Ego's splitting. He started from the previous notion of Spaltung due to J. Breuer and P. Janet, but gradually reached his original generically oriented conception to indicate an intrapsychic division, above all in the last part of his life, in reference to a splitting of the Ego into an observing part and into an observed part. Later, from his above-mentioned 1927 works on fetishism, gradually Freud posed the disavowal mechanism at the basis of this splitting phenomenon that he wanted, in turn, to put at the basis of psychoses and perversions. Freud pointed out that in psychoses a full separation from reality never takes place; in every psychosis, even the deeper ones, two antithetic psychic attitudes always exist: the one that takes into account the reality in the normal attitude, and the other that, under the drive influence, detaches the Ego from reality, giving rise to delirious thoughts. The outcomes of this Ego's splitting are therefore two opposite psychic settings,42 of which each subsists, throughout life, alongside the other and never singly of each other, but with the prevalence, from time to time, of only one of these two, to the detriment of the other. Out of these, there is a normal self-observing component which takes into account the external reality (and is prodromic to the formation of the system Ego's Ideal – Super-Ego) mainly through opposition to the next subagency (the Ideal Ego), while the other, under the Es’ instinct influence, tears out the Ego from the reality (and is prodromic to the unconscious formation of the Ideal Ego) assuming a prevalent narcissistic formation on the basis of primary identifications as a result of the mother-child relation. According to Nunberg and Lagache, the Ideal Ego, genetically prior to the Super-Ego, is the first Ego's component to be formed from the symbiotic mother-child state, upon which the subject will build up her or his further psychic development, and to which he or she comes back in psychotic states (and not only in these). According to Lagache, the Ideal Ego has sadomasochistic implications: in particular, hand in hand with Ideal Ego starting its formation, the negation of the Other, by the pair Ego's Ideal – Super-Ego, is correlative to the affirmation of Self, thus giving rise to opposite pair formation and to the next separation of their elements (consciousness process). Thus, following Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), we have two basic Ego's psychic components, the one that observes (Ego's Ideal

An Outline of Hermann Nunberg's Ego's Psychology

The little-known work of Hermann Nunberg (1932, 1955, 1975) contains a great number of new ideas and insights on psychoanalysis besides being one of the most important

treatises46 on orthodox psychoanalytic theory, as remembered by Freud himself in his preface to this work. For our purposes, we only recall here some points of his work which may have some usefulness for what is expounded here. For instance, in Nunberg (1932, 1955, 1975), a clear and complete discussion of Ego psychology is presented, of which we here outline those main points that are useful for our studies. In it, the primary role of bodily Ego is highlighted, understood as the first central core around which will revolve and build up all the following representations. The perception is the first and basic element for establishing the reality exam which develops with great slowness but on which will depend all the following psychic formation. The Ego will accomplish both internal and external requests, with a suitable right energy distribution. According to Nunberg, the Ego initially is in an unorganized phase within the Id, whose delimitation identifies a subagency called which has a full narcissistic and omnipotent character turned only toward the satisfaction of the own needs. During the psychic development, this subagency gradually leaves its role in place of the other rising subagency called the even if, particularly in psychotic states, the individual intends to come back to the Ideal Ego when fantasies of “coming back to the maternal womb” predominate. Children and schizophrenics have great difficulty in disengaging from their strong narcissistic and omnipotent Ideal Ego which has an unconscious nature and is ruled by the principle of pleasure, trying to satisfy every need also in a hallucinatory manner in case of non-immediate satisfaction. Hence, the main defence mechanisms of Ideal Ego are negation, projection and hallucination to avoid any unpleasantness. Nevertheless, in normality, it is not always possible to disregard the reality, thus giving rise to the formation of the reality principle, which is often mediated by the thought. Between the perception of reality and the action adapted to the perceived reality gradually the thought is inserted, which prepares the action, eventually substituting it. The judgment function of according to Freud, is the first transition step from ignorance to recognition. To be precise, recognition takes place thanks to a state of spiritual protection which seeks stimuli from the external world which, in turn, will be apperceived and accepted by the Ego. Therefore, recognition undergoes the influx of impulses which are aimed at establishing a link with the external world and its objects, drawing its energy from life instincts. Ignorance, instead, comes from a state which feels the stimuli of the external world as unpleasant, so perturbing the ever desiderated quite. Thus, the Ego definitively closes the perceptive system against them. Negation, instead, takes a further step, in the sense that it recognizes what is unpleasant, and, at the same time, eliminates, expels and annihilates (in the unconscious) all that. Ignorance and negation are energetically supported by death instincts. Therefore, the relationships between the external and internal world are ruled by the interplay between life and death instincts by means of the own bodily image and its borders. The gradual adaptation to reality takes place to inhibit the aggressiveness (Thanatos) through life instincts (Eros) which provide energy for libidinal investments of the first object relationships. In this regard, Nunberg considers the depersonalization states and schizophrenia as patterns to infer as a reality sense starts to form. In pursuing this, as we will see, the last 1938 Freudian thought seems to be re-evoked. In both cases, there is a retirement of libido from the lost-love object to which are also associated the world's destruction feelings with related aggressiveness tendencies that Nunberg attributes to the anxieties of

On Fetishism: First Outlines

From the epistemological viewpoint, Freud reached the conception of an Ego's splitting by studying a particular psychopathological model, that of fetishism. This is mainly meant to be a male perversion in which there is no recognition of the female penile lack since this is a fact that, if it were denied, would turn out to be potentially anxiogenic because of the castration complex which is experienced by most people (due to its universal character, as recalled above). He (or she50) therefore recuses his (or her) own sensorial perception51 which has shown to him (or her) that the female genital apparatus lacks a penis, firmly keeping to the opposite conviction. Nevertheless, this denied perception does not remain without any psychic consequence since he (or she) does not have the courage, or the dishonesty, to affirm seeing a penis, unless he (or she) stays in a psychotic state. Thus, to compensate for this, he (or she) either turns towards a further general symbolic elaboration52 (as in most normal cases) or clings to something more material, like a part of the body or an object to which he (or she) ascribes the penis role or

considers it to be acting as a material symbolic replacement for this. All that (fetish creation) is due to the fact that he (or she) does not admit this lack of a penis, notwithstanding the evidence thereof. However, Freud (1938, 1949, 1999) himself pointed out that this fetish creation does not provide the exact paradigm of the Ego's splitting mechanism, since the former belongs to the proper psychopathological context whereas the castration complex, with its possible effects (including this Ego splitting), basically concerns normality – that is to say, it concerns every human being, as we shall see later – but without excluding possible pathological degenerations (just like in fetishism). Subsequently, Freud was led to consider disavowal (as already seen, essentially based on castration anxiety) as concerning, in pathological cases, the full recusation of external reality by the psychotic, as opposed to the repression carried out by the neurotic. Indeed, the former completely recuses the external reality (due to a structural deficit of the pair Ego's Ideal – Super-Ego), whereas the latter removes the (internal) Es’ needs. In the first case, as already said, we have an Ego splitting (with a complete prevalence of the narcissistic Ideal Ego) that is different from other splitting phenomena due to the neurotic repression, because the latter concerns an internal conflict between two distinct agencies, the Ego against the Es, in regard to an internal (and not external) reality. Hence, only the former has some relationship with the external world, and Freud put it at the source of every other form of disavowal of reality that yet may be symbolically reconceived or rebuilt up. Thus, disavowal mainly has to do with primary relationships between these two Ego's subagencies, the Ideal Ego and the Ego's Ideal – Super-Ego, due to the above-mentioned Ego splitting.

On Negation, Fetishism and Linguistics

First Linguistic Implications

Following Galimberti (2006), negation (Verneinung) has to do with the conscious emersion of repressed material in a negative form in respect of that presented at the moment in which such a content was repressed. Hence, through negation, which is a mechanism laying out into the class of repression phenomena, it will be possible to make conscious a repressed content. Freud introduced such a notion in 1925, distinguishing it from that of disavowal but with which it has close relations. Indeed, according to Thass-Thienemann (1967), a strict correlation exists between grammatical negations and the Freudian concept of disavowal discussed above. After a detailed historic-epistemological comparative analysis of various grammatical negation terms, according to Thass-Thienemann, their negativistic character subtends an anal aggressive element, in which it is possible to descry the verbal expression of one of the greatest events of the child emotive-affective development, namely that concerning the discovery of sexual differences,54 with all the correlated intense anxious emotive charges which will be at the energetic basis for the incipiency of other basic psychodynamic mechanisms, like that of repression and disavowal.55 The author, in this regard, quotes the almost universally

known stories and tales whose leitmotiv are goblins, or little spirits, which often disappear in such a way that it is impossible to establish whether they are present or not. Since a little goblin is clearly a phallic symbol, all that means that sometimes the little penis is missing and at other times it is present, reflecting the primeval infantile observation experienced by a child in noting gender anatomical differences. We are at the border between the anal phase and the phallic one. Therefore, this and (and that, in part, recalls M. Heidegger's thought) correspond to the first child fantasies in observing this, which thereafter will unconsciously mould the fantasies of verbal negation. This duality between ‘being-there’ and ‘not-being-there’ has also been one of the main themes of Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger's philosophies, whose ontological theories of are at the basis of as a human response to Again according to Thass-Thienemann, there is not much difference between the metaphysical interpretation of anguish and the metapsychological one. But the latter is but the castration anxiety due, as already said, to the ascertainment of the female penile lack, so that, in conclusion, the is but the abstract elaboration of the “nothing” perceived during the childhood in the moment of seeing the related gender anatomical differences, that is to say, the bewilderment, the astonishment and the disbelief of a child before the “nothing” of a woman (in seeing her genital setting); however, this appreciable, even if little known, work of Thass-Thienemann on negation will receive further confirmation later. On the other hand, following Nunberg , the language originates from sexual instincts (as stated by H. Sperber) as well as being a substitute for actions having a desexualized meaning, so that it is the result of a sublimation process which has taken place in the first phases of psychosexual development. Nunberg recalls a fact drawn from the autobiography of the Russian writer and dramatist Maksim Gor'kij (1868-1936) who wrote that, after having taught a farmer to read, the latter exclaimed that he was astonished by the possibility that a thing, while not being there, it is as if was there.

Other Linguistic Implications

Taking into account what has been said above, the Freudian psychosexual development may play a central role in the foundation and behaviour of a certain primary psychic grammar on the basis of the above oppositions which seem to develop during the passage from the anal phase to the phallic one, thanks to the action of the disavowal mechanism. The linguistic function is one of the main symbolic systems of communication amongst human beings. It takes place during and parallel to the specific phases of Freudian psychosexual development herein considered. In this framework, two main basic rules can be identified, namely:

1. Separation of opposites. As we know, in the unconscious domain prevails a symmetric principle (see the work of I. Matte Blanco, briefly recalled in Iurato (2013) through which a statement with its negation may be valid. Within it, it is not possible to have a distinction between the elements of an opposite pair, so that, for example, there is no distinction between “I” and “not-I” (or Me and not-Me). Following Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), Freud, for the first time, spoke of opposites in regard to perversions in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (of 1905), stating that some of these take place through pairs of opposites, and this fact has a great importance from the theoretical

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   viewpoint. From here on, the notion will be present almost everywhere in all of Freud's work. The opposite elements of such a pair are irreducible each to the other, thus giving rise to a psychic conflict which will be overcome only through a dialectic process. With the separation of the primary opposite elements (I, not-I), through the Ego's splitting (from the disavowal mechanism), it will then be possible to attain the first rudiments of otherness, with the formation of “you”, “he” and “she”. These are the first steps towards the formation of the own identity in respect to the otherness. In doing so, the identity and symmetric principles take place, which are two elementary principles of Aristotelian logic. To be precise, the main elementary Boolean logic operators, upon which relies elementary logic, are conjugation, negation, disjunction, material implication and biconditional implication. Nevertheless, C.S. Peirce proved that all five of these operators can be derived from only two primitives, namely conjugation and negation (see Akhtar and O'Neil, 2011; and references therein).

In particular, from the conclusion given by the last pivotal identification “not-penis = castration”, a certain more or less strong anxiety follows (of castration, stronger in males for obvious reasons) whose consequent affective-emotive energetic charge must be cathexed to avoid such an anguish. From here, the disavowal mechanism starts to operate in its stronger action. Therefore, the possible solutions are mainly twofold: a fetishistic (material) degeneration or a symbolic elaboration, both of which are oriented to desperately find such a penis lacking in females. In normal cases, the symbolic elaboration is the first step towards the institution of every other following human symbolic process. En passant, we observe that the above a) and b) processes are at the early origins of the elementary logical thought (in its Aristotelian form): indeed, from them follow the identity, symmetry and transitivity principles by which, in turn, follows dialectic reasoning,57 through the building up of the naïve set theory in its Boolean form, thus obtaining the elementary propositional algebra of Aristotelian logic (see Iurato, 2013). On the other hand, following Greenacre (1971), the fetish represents the substitute for the maternal phallus in which the child had first believed and which he (or she) does not want to renounce, keeping, therefore, his (or her) initial idea thanks to the fetish, at

the cost of a violent denial of reality. The fetish is the symbol of triumph at the threat of castration and a protection from it. According to Freud, fetishists have a sort of double image of female castration, that is to say, the fetish, at the same time, denies and affirms the existence of castration, thus giving rise to opposite attitudes. Therefore, the symbol (that is to say, the fetish) is usually what may reunite in itself (or put together) the opposites, in line with the original etymological meaning of symbol and with what has been said at points and This is what Freud himself claims, to confirm what we have said above. Subsequently Freud focused his attention on fetishism in relation to the reality sense and to the Ego's splitting, as we have outlined above. Indeed, the castration anxiety gives rise to a conflict between the instinctual demand (due to the pleasure principle) and the reality domain, in which the child does not want to renounce the gratification but at the same time he (or she) does not deny the reality, inducing two opposite reactions which will be at the centre of the next Ego's splitting. This is the early origin of dialectic reasoning. According to R. C. Bak, the symbolic meaning of fetish is due to condensation processes put in place during pregential phases (namely, the phallic and Œdipus ones). Again according to Greenacre , the fetish is the key to a hesitant genitality. It should satisfy stability, visibility and tangibility requirements, as well as be able to symbolize the penis and its opposite (whence Then in Greenacre , the reverential fear reactions in childhood mainly start at the end of the Œdipus phase as a result of the previous strong penis reverential awe during the phallic phase which implies, at the same time, fear and admiration of the penis itself. These contrasting phallic images often remain in adult life, and might be put into relation with what is said in the above point These last discussions are also linkable with creative attitudes, as we will see later. Hermann gives a psychoanalytic explanation of the above-mentioned basic logic principles on the basis of the Œdipus complex. But, on the basis of his clinical case, Hermann also introduced another psychic mechanism, called that he wanted to bring back to the castration anxiety and that will provide every dualistic feature of thought. Hermann puts it at the basis of his framework, even trying to explain the Œdipus complex through it. On the other hand, Hermann himself states that the logical thought comes from a pre-existent primitive thought that he calls that is to say, he wants to consider a totemic origin of logical thought, so that the latter has a substantial fetishistic nature.

On Embodied Linguistics

On the basis of the previous work of I. Matte Blanco on the inextricable relationships between symmetric and asymmetric thought (which comprise those related to emotion and rational thought), the analysis of the relationships between primordial thought language (like those experienced in altered states of consciousness) and cognitive linguistic features (like syntactic structures and creativity), as discussed in Cariola (2012), show what primary role the body boundary awareness elements have in primary conscious acts, like the right perception and usage of space-time categories and those regarding the right separation between Me and not-Me, the latter playing a fundamental role in consciousness development, as Freud himself stated. As regards, then, what is said at point a), a further confirmation that separation of opposites takes place during the passage from the phallic phase to the Œdipus one comes from Cuccio (2011, 2012) and references therein, where, essentially, it is said that the first forms of linguistic negation are acquired between two and a half years old and three years old, and that these play a

very basic role in human cognitive development. We textually report what is said in Cuccio (2011, p. 48), namely:

By looking at first-language learning in infancy, we can see […] three steps in the acquisition of linguistic negation: 1) rejection/refusal; 2) disappearance/non-existence/unfulfilled expectation; 3) denial. According to many studies, […] rejection is the first category of negation to be acquired. Children use “no” to express refusal of something existing in their present context. However, we can find examples of rejection in human pre-linguistic gestures and even in animal behaviour. In fact, before the time children start to produce the single word “no” to express rejection, they have already expressed rejection non-linguistically. Rejection […] does not require abstract mental representations, while non-existence and denial do require them. The second category of linguistic negation to arise is non-existence/unfulfilled expectation. At this point, children are able to signal the absence or disappearance of an expected referent in the context of speech or indicate something that violates their expectations, based on previous experience (for instance, malfunctioning toys). Lastly, the third category to be acquired is denial. Denial implies negation of a predication. The referent is usually symbolically expressed. […] To deny, children must have the ability to discern between their own knowledge of the world and the knowledge of their listener. In order to deny a sentence, children have to manage with two propositions, one affirming and one negating the same predication; and they have to ascribe one of them to the person they are speaking to. “To deny the truth of another person's statement entails the understanding that the other person may hold different beliefs, or that language is itself a representation of reality, not reality itself” […]. Denial is usually acquired by the age of two and a half years. […] Categories of negation are acquired according to the complexity of the inferences that they entail. At the beginning,

It is clearly possible to establish parallels between the non-existence and denial processes of the above and the disavowal mechanism which we have considered. According to Cuccio (2011), negation is a typical universal future of human language and there is no known animal communication system that has negation. The acquisition of linguistic negation is a fundamental step in human cognitive development. Following Cuccio (2011, p. 47):

Many studies carried out during these last decades have been looking at the acquisition of negation in first-language learning […]. All of them seem to agree on the opinion that the acquisition of linguistic negation is a fundamental step in cognitive development. According to Spitz (1957), the ability “to say no” is the most important achievement of first infancy. In fact, by saying “no” children, for the first time, are symbolically expressing an abstract concept (see D'Aniello, 1989; Spitz, 1957). The use of negation requires complex cognitive abilities. As psycholinguistic research has shown, in order to use negation children need to know the difference between their own mental representations and the external world; they need to know the difference between their own mental representations and the mental representations of the person they are speaking to; moreover, in complex forms of negation, children cannot entirely rely on a present perceptual scene but instead they need to manage their listeners’ beliefs and other epistemic states. Thus, although the expression of negation is acquired very early in infancy (before children learn to talk, in fact prelinguistic infants can reject something by using gestures or by shaking their

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head), negation is all but cognitively simple. Of course, linguistic negation is far more complex than its non-linguistic expression; still “no” is acquired very early on, being one of the first words in language acquisition. Psycholinguists have been identifying the different semantic categories of negation that emerge during cognitive and linguistic development. The number of these categories increases or decreases depending on the criteria of classification adopted in each study. However, although there is not a general agreement, we will see that the functions and the order of appearance in these studies are roughly the same.

On the other hand, linguistic negation is a metalinguistic operator because it cannot be referentially used, and this is a remarkable fact for the development of consciousness because, amongst other things, this operator entails a second-order mental representation. Finally, following Cuccio (2011), it has been observed that ASD subjects are unable to use a correct linguistic negation, coherently with what will be said in the following Part 2. Thereafter, in Cuccio (2012), interesting relations between embodiment and linguistic functions are highlighted on the basis of the prominent discovery of the mirror neuron system which has given scientific proof that language and cognition are embodied. We now follow Cuccio (2012, p. 2) (who, in part, revisits what is said in her previous 2011 work):

According to many studies […] rejection is the first category of negation to be acquired. Children use “no” to express refusal of something existing in their present context. Before the time children start to produce the single word “no” to express rejection, they have already expressed rejection non-linguistically. Rejection […] does not require abstract mental representations, while non-existence and denial do require them. The second category of linguistic negation to arise is non-existence/unfulfilled expectation. At this point, children are able to signal the absence or disappearance of an expected referent in the context of speech or to indicate something that violates their expectations, based on previous experience (for instance, malfunctioning toys). Lastly, the third category to be acquired is denial. Denial implies negation of a predication. The referent is usually symbolically expressed. […] To deny children

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must have the ability to discern between their own knowledge of the world and the knowledge of their listener. In order to deny a sentence, children have to deal with two propositions, one affirming and one negating the same predication; and they have to ascribe one of these to the person they are speaking to. To deny the truth of another person's statement entails the understanding that the other person may hold different beliefs, or that language is itself a representation of reality, not reality itself […]. Denial is usually acquired by the age of two and a half years.

Clearly, there are many interesting points which lend themselves to being explained by means of what is proposed in this paper and that might be the aim of a further in-depth study. The importance of negation in logic and in all scientific inquiry is also reconfirmed by B.E. Litowitz in Akhtar and O'Neil (2011), where a complete and in-depth review of the already made psycholinguistic researches on rejection, refusal and denial59 is presented in the light of psychoanalytic perspectives. To these last linguistic arguments, namely of the possible explanatory potential which might have the theoretical pattern here considered and based on the disavowal mechanism (considered to be a general psychodynamic mechanism), it will therefore be necessary to return later.

Other Post-Freudian Perspectives on Fetishism

A General Historical Account

According to Resnik (1979), at the basis of symbolization lies the aware depressive60 elaboration of absence as a model of the expression of a lack, or loss, due to a traumatic separation (like the mother-child one), where the symbol phenomenologically arises as a new and indirect presence to fill up the not-being of the absence, taking the original object's place. According to Fenichel (1945), fetishism necessarily implies some form of Ego's splitting because of the attempt to unconsciously disavow (by Ego's Ideal) a (painful) truth at the same time recognized by the conscious part of the individual's personality (by the Ideal Ego). Furthermore, we agree with the statement of Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) according to whom, due to its basic characteristics of having fundamental relationships with the external reality, it is assumed that disavowal is a primary founding dynamic process of the human psychic reality rather than a simple defence mechanism related to a specific perceptive fact (A. Freud). Moreover, this last claim is based on the the Jacques Lacan symbolic register (whose valuable work will deserve further consideration), as already said. In particular, the theoretical framework of this author takes into consideration the general linguistic structure in the form given by R. Jakobson, in which, roughly speaking, the language is articulated on the two axes of the presence (syntagmatic level) and of the absence (paradigmatic level), that is to say, according to the rhetorical figures respectively of the metaphor (by condensation) and

metonymy (by displacement). And the fetish61 formation, in its symbolic and material nature, just accomplishes to these. As we shall see, the above evaluations of Resnik will be in full agreement with the notions which will be later exposed. According to Alexander (1948), the origins of the notion of fetishism are particularly intricate. The first interpretations of fetishism date back to Alfred Binet and Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the 1870s, which were retaken later by Freud himself who pointed out, above all, the symbolic meaning of the fetish object, and according to whom this symbolically represents a sort of female penis that the child fantastically imagines to be owned by the woman too, to avoid the Œdipus castration anxiety. Then, according to Giberti and Rossi , Ellenberger and Greenacre , the fetish is but the symbolic representation of the phallus. Furthermore, Giberti and Rossi and Greenacre briefly recall the related ideas of some authors, including E. Glover, O. Fenichel, P. Bergman, J. Harnik, E. Kronold, E. Vencovsky, S. Bonnett, S. Payne, M. Balint, W. H. Gillespie, R. C. Bak, P. Weissmann, M. Sperling, M. Wulff, E. Sterba, J. K. Friedjung, A. Z. Idelsohn, S. Lorand, P. Greenacre and others, according to whom the fetish (in its degenerate meaning) is a symbol of parts of the maternal body, used for the purpose of avoiding separation anxiety or to restore the integrity of the maternal body considered to be impaired or fragmented. Afterwards, J. Chasseguet-Smirgel made a deeper historic-epistemological recognition of the most important contributions to this argument, reaching the conclusion that the fetish, as a depository for all the partial object loss during human development, allows both the separation from the mother and the castration complex with its anxious implications to be avoided. The fetish shows displacement and condensation properties. The former are related to attempts to shift the strong energetic charge associated with castration anxieties and fears (as well as frustrations) in such a manner as to minimize them. The latter, on the other hand, are mainly correlated to attempts to reorganize that lost unity of a fragmented corporal image that characterizes fetishism (see later). In this regard, for instance, Wulff reports some 1946 clinical cases of infantile fetishism in which the created fetish joined together in itself the various partial objects, again in accordance with the original meaning of the term “symbol”. However, on general perversions and their history, see above all Khan Masud and Chasseguet-Smirgel .

Some Clinical Data

As already mentioned above, Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) stressed the fact that the disavowal mechanism could be a fundamental and common psychic mechanism. This might find further clinical confirmation in what follows. First, Freud himself pointed out the polymorphously perverse nature of the child, a feature which potentially persists until the advent of the Œdipus complex (see Rycroft, 1968a) and roughly consisting in the interchange of various erotogenic zones amongst them. It is not clear at what point of childhood psychosexual development takes place such as a set of disorganized and polymorphic perverse states (from which will depart neuroses and perversions). But then, according to Giberti and Rossi (1996, p. 332), higher or lower degrees of fetishism are present at every age and in every person, as well as in certain life circumstances like in

mourning and its elaboration (Kleinian depressive position63). Nunberg (1932, 1955, 1975), in discussing perversions, states that within certain limits, the deviation of the object from the final sexual aim is quite normal. Raphling (1989), in discussing a case of female fetishism, states that the clinical example analysed by him confirms the existence of fetishism in women and suggests that subtle forms of perversion may go unnoticed and be more prevalent than previously realized. Greenacre (1971) states that forms of sexual perversions are far from being rare. Furthermore, in Greenacre , the author states that there exists a ubiquitous and not worrying childish fetishism, mainly based on the need for contact with the maternal body (D. W. Winnicott), which will be spontaneously rejected around three or four years old, but that might degenerate in pathological cases. Therefore, according to studies made by O. Stevenson, D. W. Winnicott and M. Wulff (see ) fetishistic phenomena are almost always normally present through the phenomenology of which play a fundamental role in the constitution of reality and of object relations. In Greenacre , the author discusses on some researches about the normal presence of a fetish phenomenology in childhood which will be spontaneously abandoned after the phallic-Œdipus period. In this regard, see Spiegel , in which the author states that this fact is very frequent in baby boys and baby girls. Freud gives a great deal to the ascertainment of the lack of a penis in the mother which is almost ubiquitous in childhood (see Greenacre because it is related to the almost equally ubiquitous anatomic sexual difference awareness. According to Garzotto , fetishism represents the psychopathological degeneration (paraphilia) of a normal psychic modality in a child, during whose development he (or she) replaces the above-mentioned primitive (body) fragments with their symbolic substitutes like, for example, games, dolls, teddies, Lego, and so on (according to Winnicott). This tendency, known by Solomon and Patch as to privilege portions of object, or fragments ( in place of the global or entire one ( is just the essence of fetishism. In regard to the set of these fragments, the adult fetishist develops a drive which has the modalities of adult sexuality even if he (or she) is not able to cathexis his (or her) drives on the sexual object considered in its totality since this would re-evoke an anxious situation related to his (or her) incapacity to experience an adult love. Hence, he (or she) is unable to develop a global or unified sense. Following Greenacre , the bodily Ego starts to develop from the first four months of life hereafter, where fundamental integration processes of the various sensorial (above all visual and tactile) explorations take place to give rise to a corporal Self as separate from the external world. In this period, the presymbolic formation of a and related phenomena according to the 1953 D. W. Winnicott seminal work take place, thanks to which the transition from the oral phase relation with the mother to the first real object relations with the external world is possible, and that will form the so-called Winnicott proves that the which is almost ubiquitous, is usually formed by a preferred transitional object like a toy or any other object which has to do with the external world. This is both a Me-object and a not-Me-object until the not-being-Me is fully accepted, thus allowing the separation of opposites (see above point According to R. Löwenstein, the transitional object may start from the genitals as well as the breasts. It will be put, by the child, into relationships with the body to give rise to his (or her) corporal image which, in fetishists, is the arena where those fantasies and memories are represented as corporal images instead of thought images. These corporal representations are often cathexed by strong aggressive and libidinal charges. As a result of this,

Other Perspectives on Fetishism

According to Glover (1933, 1949), at the foundations of fetishism, it relies on the basic unconscious mechanism of displacement64 through which genital interests and incestuous desires are degenerately displaced toward the upper or lower body parts. Above all he stressed the symbolic meaning of the fetish which may be various but with a prevalence for the phallic one, the latter being related to the presence of a female penis which, in a certain sense, is considered mysteriously hidden within the mother's body. This last fantasy has a universal character in infancy,65 above all in male children, sometimes degenerating into paraphilia in adults, and with a regressive degeneration of genital Œdipus desires. According to Rosolato (1967, 1969) and Etchegoyen (1991), the fetish is the “counterpart of the subject's splitting”, in the sense that the fetishist recognizes the castration but, because of his (or her) presentification of the imago66 of the female penis, he (or she) imagines the one that does not exist. D ‘après Lacan, presentification is the other face of what is disowned. The fetish, according to Lacan, presentificates (or embodies) and, at the same time, veils the female penis. According to Rosolato, the fetish manifests itself as separated from its corporeal support but, at the same time, is also in metonymic continuity with the body67 (object fetish in degenerate cases, or symbol in normal cases), and this is a fundamental consideration for our purposes because it is

Fetishism in the Culture

Other paradigms on fetishism besides the Freudian one have been formulated, like those of Charles de Brosses, August Comte, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx: in this regard, for a brief account of these, see, for instance, Valeri (1979), Màdera (1977) and Galimberti (2006). Taking these into account, together with the Freudian one, it is possible to identify a common point amongst them. To be precise, the one according to which the fetish70 is conceived as an object71 formed by a contradictory relationship with the reality, or rather that gives, yes, a fictitious representation of reality but that makes a true representation of it also possible. The fetish thus realizes a sort of synthesis (fetishistic synthesis) between these two opposite tendencies which, although it is false in itself, nevertheless anticipates a true relation between the human being and nature, thereby constituting a first conceptual framework which makes the collection and classification of positive observations possible. Fetishism is based on a kind of confusion between “natural” and “supernatural”, between something having human nature and something having superhuman nature, or something having animated nature and something having inanimate nature. In Freud, then, such a position becomes more complex because it implies an initial object splitting (Was-spaltung) which will be correlative to a subsequent subject splitting (Ich-spaltung) that, in turn, turns out to be correlated with the former in normal cases, but not in pathological ones. Finally, both in Freud and Marx, the fetish's genesis lies in the fictitious separation of the “part” from the “whole” (even if this is meant to be related to different total objects, namely the person in Freud and the work in Marx). And the latter is just a first form of the principle of inductive reasoning. On the other hand, bearing in mind that mysterious meaning of the fetish (and its relationship with the origins of religion and mythology), according to Greenacre (1971) and Freud himself, attempts to give explanations to the consequent basic secrets provided by the fetish itself lead to intellectual activity, first through sorcery, religion and mythology, then through science. An emblematic example of this is provided by Freud himself in the essay The Theme of the Three Caskets (of 1913), where, inter alia, he states that the fundamental secrets are those on the origins of life and of destiny which are, in turn, implicit in the impenetrable enigma of the riddle of the sphinx that Œdipus solved, thereby obtaining the opportunity to live. From this, A. Gross stated that the secret of the symbolism of mythology is, at the primitive level, in close relation with the processes and organs of the body and whose meaning is connected both with the fear of death and life relations. On the other hand, the secret is strictly related to the anal phase and its features, first of all the faeces, and the anus, this last place of secrecy and fortress of defence.

The Phyllis Greenacre Viewpoint

According to Greenacre73 (1971), fetishism should be treated from the point of view of corporal image. During the changeover from the phallic to the Œdipus stage, a great

castration problem subsists. This lies at the basis of every next Ego's splitting acting on an already instable, insecure and little structured bodily image formed during pregential phases. In this moment of psychosexual development, the first forms of displacement and condensation processes take place in relation to the formation of a corporal image from its component parts, and in delineating its borders which, in turn, induce variations in the subjective perception of dimensions. The choice of fetish is quite undetermined, even if its nature will be determined by the outcomes of previous destabilizing prephallic castration anxieties. In Greenacre (1971), the author presents further considerations on fetishism, highlighting the mainly psychosomatic nature of it. To be precise, it is the result of a defect of the corporal image which the subject will remedy through a fetish creation in the absence of symbolic elaboration. In pregenital phases, there is a particular corporal sensibility which reaches its highest value during the phallic stage. In the same period, the formation of the corporal sense of Self takes place, crossed by strong aggressive and libidinal energies which, if not suitably managed, may lead to dissolution sentiments, hence to degenerative phenomena. In Greenacre (1971), the author confirms the primary role played by the formation of the bodily image of Self which presents both an internal and external aspect. Thanks to this, the child starts to be aware of his (or her) own genitals and of the visage. The core of this sense of identity is strongly structured and influenced, from the anal stage until the phallic-Œdipus period, by many factors concerning the external world. In this phase, the child is aware of herself or himself as existing in a world of external objects. He or she hears have memories and thoughts, learns to evaluate her or his own dimensions, has knowledge of sexual differences and of many parts of her or his own body. In creative subjects, this image of Self is quite unstable and susceptible to possible diversifications. In Greenacre , the author expresses the idea that bodily Ego's disorders (at the root of fetishism) are mainly due to the inadequacy of relationships with parents during the first two years of existence which will be at the basis of a primary emphasis given to castration anxieties and to complementary narcissistic defences. In Greenacre , the author summarizes perversions and their dynamic aspects. In particular, for our purposes, it is important to outline some points of her study, particularly those examining material fetish and its comparison with imagination. The fetish, as stated, develops from an imperfect formation of the own corporal image during the related libidinal phases, above all connected to genital organization, with more or less severe repercussions on reality sense. The main feature of fetishism is first an excellent degree of primary identification, which is a normal characteristic of every human being, but which, in pathological degeneration, is distinguished by a prolongation of the introjective-projective phase (typical preconscious mechanism of primary identification), in which there is an incomplete separation between the own Ego and the Other, that is to say, a poor separation of the elements of the opposite pair (I, not-I) or (Me, not-Me), as outlined above. This is mainly due to the fact that a fetishist is unable to make a clear distinction between opposite images that he (or she) has of female genital organs, as Freud himself claimed in 1938, notwithstanding he (or she) is able to distinguish between males and females as mental categories, but not to compare their genital apparatuses. All this, according to Freud (and as confirmed later by other psychoanalysts like K. Abraham and S. Payne), will be at the basis of a weakness of the Ego. In 1965, R. A. Spitz pointed out that visual abilities are focalized quite early, so that the recognition of anatomic gender differences (above all in genitals) is available quite early for the child. This is a notable fact for organizing and structuring own corporal image which starts from the previous recognition of the bodily image of genital settings. All this takes place from before four years old, in fact from about two years old, when the child is also able to roughly recognize her or his mirror image. Nevertheless, the