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THIS PAPER IS AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE CLEAR CONCEPTUALLY WHAT one of the central goals of research in child development must be; and it does this by singling out for emphasis a neglected problem in the development of human thought processes, which from early childhood links closely the creative and the neurotic potential.
The symbolic process is the unique gift and attribute of human mentation, and its most valuable. At the same time that it is essential for all that is creative in human thinking it also is most vulnerable to distortion. This is because it develops around a core of asymbolic or preconscious processing (what was called "imageless thought" by the Würzburg school). This preconscious processing begins in infancy to play an effective role through a process akin to conditioning; but if it is to continue to play an effective role in our adult thought processes, weighted and fragmentary samples must be drawn from this preconscious stream and must then be represented by symbols which are used for purposes of memory, rumination, coding and ordering, and communication. Thus the symbolic