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Gillibert examines the Freud-Jung polemic. Such polemics may be an essential characteristic of psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis there seems to be a ceaseless oscillation between the sort of oneiromancy that leads to boring mythologies, which Freud assiduously avoided, and the rationality for which The Interpretation of Dreams showed us the way. Attempts to resolve this essential ontological equivocation have led variously to an archetypal idealism as in Jung, to an intellectual idealism as in Bion, to the positivism (another form of idealism) of a purely genetic psychology, or to the positivism of the signifier (Lacan). Regarding the theory of symbolism, Gillibert feels that some important aspects have been forgotten and that there has been too much emphasis on the etymology of the word "symbol" as a "throwing together" of the world of things and the human world. Gillibert emphasizes instead reality's indifference to everything that is human and the effect that the knowledge of this indifference can have on human narcissism. There is in Freud a pessimistic note, a sort of stoicism, in the face of this indifference. Freud, however, emphasized both the joining of things to the human world and their disjointedness from human concerns. The debate continues in discussions of nature versus culture. However much one wants to make of language and symbolic unities, the acoustic images or signifiers have no autonomy in themselves. There is always a reference to a thing. The world of things is not born causally from the world of words, as Lacan postulates, nor does the contrary hold. If language is a symbolic process, it is so because it symbolizes not the absence of the thing, but the whole in which the thing in itself is included and comprehended, but does not have in itself any meaning. Language symbolizes the distance separating us from the world of things. It is dangerous to manipulate symbolism, whether in a theory of knowledge or in therapeutic practice.