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From the eighteenth century until recently the dominant view of language as presented in textbooks of psychology was that its origin and main function lay in its being an instrument of social control, man's main vehicle of communication. Human language was seen as a further development, a "higher" branch of animal communication but not categorically different from it. Karl Bühler (1934) stressed the fact that a study of the child's acquisition of language will yield the most valuable clues to mankind's acquisition of it.
Recently other views, some old, some new, have come to the fore. Language is seen as a requisite for conceptualized thought (Cassirer, 1944); the structure and vocabulary of specific language types are considered of primary importance in shaping the thinking of an ethnic group (Whorf, 1956); language is regarded as a vocal actualization of man's tendency to see realities symbolically (Sapir, 1933). Communication is one of the basic functions of language.
It is, of course, generally known that the term "symbol" has a specific meaning in psychoanalysis. It refers to the affect-loaded, partly unconscious, primordial symbols that are central to our understanding of mental disorders and of creative thought, dreams, parapraxes, jokes, etc. Freud, Ferenczi, Jones, O. Rank, Sachs, Silberer, and others all used it in this way. However, in general usage and in language theory "symbol" has a very broad meaning: a symbol is primarily a conceptual tool. It represents, brings to the mind, something that is a "mere idea" and as such has no other physical properties, or something that transcends the sensory data given here and now.