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Subjectivity, the phenomenon of subjective awareness—that unique personal experience that differentiates us from each other and our species as a whole from all others—is as elusive as it is exemplary of the human condition. Because of the difficulty of conceptualizing about it, subjectivity has long been a topic of philosophical concern. Its importance has always been implicit in psychoanalysis insofar as Freud established free association as a fundamental method of analysis.
Recently, subjectivity became an explicit issue in psychoanalysis, having been suggested as the central concept in a proposed psychoanalytic phenomenology (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984). This approach represents one expression of the fairly extensive movement in contemporary Freudian thought that seeks to reframe psychoanalysis conceptually as a pure psychology because of the inherent difficulties of classical metapsychology that have been widely discussed in recent years (Gill, 1976; Holt, 1975; Klein, 1976; Kohut, 1977; Schafer, 1976).
The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the emergence of subjectivity as a central concept in psychoanalysis and the concept of symbolization as discussed by Langer (1942). Symbolization—the power of symbols—is the key theme of the modern era. It is a new “great generative idea” that is currently in its nascent stage, according to Langer (1942).