Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Concerning the precursors of the two symbolic processes during the first year, Dr. Annemarie P. Weil pointed out that infants' preverbal gestures and their understanding of symbols used by others in asking questions of, suggesting things to, and naming things for them may be considered as antecedents of linguistic symbol formation. The fluidity and frequent misunderstanding of

early speech development may have an effect on the formation of later unconscious symbols. Dr. Weil stressed the great individual differences among children in degrees of freedom and richness of both conventional representational play and of idiosyncratic symbolic play. She emphasized the importance of the child's interaction with the mother in the formation of both types of symbolism, pointing out that maternal feedback in the form of repetition, refinement, and clarification enhances the child's linguistic repertoire. Dr. Melvin A. Scharfman felt that the distinction between psychoanalytic symbolism and linguistic and other symbolic processes should not be overdrawn. He noted that the unconscious signified and signifier are bound to one another in a manner usually associated with secondary process thought. This suggests that unconscious symbols partake more of secondary process than a definition strongly linking them with primary process would indicate. Dr. Scharfman contrasted the early memories which Freud referred to as "perceptual images" with more complex "memory images" which are organized according to the secondary process. Early "perceptual images" seem related to psychoanalytic symbols and appear in dreams and hallucinations. Freud abandoned the idea that memory traces differ in location in the psychic apparatus and instead proposed that shifts in energic cathexis would determine the accessibility to consciousness of a given memory trace. Certain people, such as artists, may become conscious of psychoanalytic symbols; or secondary process manifestations, suc