Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

October 16, 1978. SYMBOLIC PROCESSES AND SYMBOL FORMATION. Harold P. Blum, M.D.

To help clarify the term "symbolism" and to more rigorously differentiate between the two main symbolic processes—unconscious or psychoanalytic symbolism and the symbolism involved in receptive and expressive language and related phenomena—Dr. Blum made the following points. Unconscious or psychoanalytic symbolism is related to the primary process and is not taught or learned. A universal phenomenon, it appears spontaneously during development, unconnected with any intention to communicate with another, and promotes fantasy rather than reality testing. Psychoanalytic symbols arise out of early perceptions of the body and its functions which are primarily but not exclusively visual, are connected with infantile instinctual aims and their objects, and are linked by a process of perceptual association through a series of displacements away from the body to more distant and neutral percepts. Psychoanalytic symbols are idiosyncratic and are not bound by social custom or convention. They convey disguised thoughts and affects which are outside of awareness and may be viewed as representing compromise formations between instinctual wishes and their gratification. Communicative symbolism or language, as distinguished from psychoanalytic symbolism, is related to the secondary process. It is learned and taught, is intended for communication with others, is not idiosyncratic but consensually shared, has its origins primarily in auditory-vocal percepts generated by the self and important objects, and promotes reality testing.

Absolute distinction between psychoanalytic symbolism and linguistic symbolism is an idealization: inevitably, neither will appear in pure form wthout some admixture of the other. Both probably evolve from an undifferentiated symbolic-cognitive matrix and then develop along relatively independent lines, with unconscious symbolism primarily a drive derivative and linguis