Da Rocha Barros - Reflections On The Clinical Implications of Symbolism

The International Journal of
Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92:879–901 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2011.00402.x
Reflections on the clinical implications of symbolism
Elias M. da Rocha Barros and Elizabeth L. da Rocha Barros

Rua Tupi 579, apto 161, São Paulo 01233001, Brazil – erbarro@terra.com.br
(Final version accepted 13 September 2010)
We start by stressing the idea that the process itself of constructing the symbol in
its different components and its vicissitudes is centrally important to contemporary
psychoanalysis as symbols are essential for thinking and for storing emotional
experiences in our memory and for conveying our affects to others and to
ourselves. Our implicit idea is that internal attacks are not directed only at the
internal objects, but also include attacks on the structure or forms of the mental
representations before and while they become constituted in symbols. It is by this
means that destructive impulses invade the processes of symbolic construction.
Symbols can lose their plasticity and thus silence the emotions and therefore cut
off the patient from their meanings. Our clinical material allows us to increase
our understanding of how the formal qualities of symbols operate in mental life,
and how they can interfere in the capacity to work through emotional experiences.
Finally, our reflections based on the analysis of a patient with difficulty in relating
with the meanings of the symbols he produced will highlight the importance of the
analyst’s reverie along the process of formulating an interpretation. This paper is
also part of a development in the study of the process of reverie.
Keywords: symbolization, symbolism, presentational symbolism, discursive symbolism,

connotation, denotation, transformation, progression in formal qualities, working
through, affective pictogram, mental representation, Meltzer, Ogden, Cassirer, Langer,
Freedman and Russell, Salomonsson, dream, meaning, reverie
Introduction
In this paper we intend to discuss the function of different aspects of the
formal structure of symbols in mental life and thus contribute to the under-
standing of the process of symbol formation. We start by stressing the idea
that the process itself of constructing the symbol in its different components
and its vicissitudes is centrally important to contemporary psychoanalysis since
symbols are essential for thinking and for storing emotional experiences in
our memory and for conveying our affects to others and make them explicit
for ourselves. We intend to combine some of the ideas presented by the phi-
losophers Susan Langer (1943, 1953) and E. Cassirer (1972) on this matter
with our psychoanalytical perspective.
Cassirer’s reflections, which have profound implications for psychoanalysis,
indicate that the symbol cannot be reduced to its condition as an envelope
that transmits meanings (limited only to the representative function), because
it is also an essential vehicle1 of thinking. Using the term ‘vehicle’, we are
emphasizing its functional, operational aspect which sustains other mental
1
‘Organ’ in the original.
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880 E. M. da Rocha Barros and E. L. da Rocha Barros
functions, constituted by symbolic forms that are deeply embedded in the

psychic apparatus and in the unconscious. The symbol does not limit itself
to communicating the content of thoughts; it is also the vehicle through
which this content is shaped.
We think and phantasize using symbols. We also incorporate the trans-
formations of our unconscious phantasies, through metamorphosis in the
symbols. It is the multiple forms of unconscious phantasies and their
symbolic transformations that organize and give meaning to our affective
lives. Langer (1942) offers as ‘new key’ for philosophy the study of symbolic
modes and the changeable relationship of form and content. The symbol is
the mediating element of our relation with the world for keeping in our
memory substantial aspects of the lived, we need to store in our minds what
she calls fantasy. Langer uses the term to designate a mental synthesis of
that which we see with the eyes of our mind organized in combinations
of patterns of visual, auditory and kinesthetic symbols. These patterns can
be evoked in our memory when we are faced with new emotional experi-
ences that we do not immediately understand and feel the urge to do so.
In a seminal paper on incremental symbolization, Freedman and Russell
(2003) deal with very similar issues addressed by our paper. They also drew
part of their argument on Langer and Cassirer but we differ in the use we
make of their ideas. We agree in many respects with their conclusion but
also disagree on some important points. We will explore our disagreements
while developing our reflection.
In order that this paper be better assimilated by a wider readership, we
wish at this point to present briefly the various underlying, distinctive
aspects of symbols that help understanding of their role as instruments for
grasping and transmitting meaning.
Sign is the generic term that comprises both symbols and signals. But a
simple sign language cannot represent our feelings and emotional dilemmas
in a way that enables them to be observed and thought about – that is,
expressively (Harris-Williams, 2010, p. 56). In order to think our emotional
experience we need symbols (a much more complex kind of sign) as vehicles
for their conception. Langer (1942) proposes a distinction between presenta-
tional symbolism and discursive symbolism. Each of these categories follows
different logics. Both can articulate thought but in different ways. Presenta-
tional symbolism is associated with the expressive forms of emotion; it is
non-discursive and has a fundamentally connotative (others prefer to call it
‘affective’) character (it refers to the subjective meaning and transmits infor-
mation because it evokes other realities through associations). Discursive
symbolism is discursive and has at first a denotative character (it refers to
the objective meaning and at its lowest level just to the words in their dictio-
nary state). Discursive symbolism in its developed form can also contain
expressiveness. Presentational symbolism is intuitive (often a crystallized
form of intuition) and feeds on the patterns of our emotional life, and it is
in this form that affects are evoked. Its purpose is not to present ideas as
propositions or concepts, as occurs in everyday language.
In this paper we include these two types of symbolism under the term
mental representation although we maintain the distinction between these
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Reflections on the clinical implications of symbolism 881
two symbolic forms and consider that the function of each of the constit-
utive aspects of representation has a different logical and psychological
function.
Langer (1942), commenting on how feelings are grasped and transmitted
through symbols, refers to the central role played by presentational symbol-
ism and suggests its property is to transmit what she calls ‘‘likeness’’; that is,
it ‘‘exemplifies objectively what the feeling is like subjectively’’ (Innis, 2009,
p. 47). Other authors, (Dewey, 1931; Peirce, 1992) refer to this same prop-
erty of symbols as the quality of suchness. By suchness they are touching on
something very similar to likeness, which is the capacity to indicate or
suggest kinds of experiences. Presentational symbolism does not name, it
exemplifies ‘what they are about’ (Innis, 2009). He adds: ‘‘Feeling itself, the
perceived suchness of things, is a form of meaning-making, and forms of
feeling can be expressed in material media,2 which give us true knowledge,
although it cannot be put into words’’ (pp. 47–8).
Here comes one important difference between our ideas and part of what
Freedman and Russell (2003) elaborate on. We underscore this quality of
presentational symbolism to suggest or exemplify kinds of experiences while
they stress mainly the importance of naming (discursive symbolism) the
emotion involved in the experience.
Pistiner de CortiÇas (2009) presents clearly and succinctly the processes of
the building of the mind as a symbolizing apparatus. Within this context the
present paper intends to be more specific and complements some of her
ideas.
Hanna Segal’s (1957) contribution (see Riccardo Steiner [2009], who dis-
cussed in depth, highlighted and connected her ideas to those proposed by
Charles Peirce) is still essential in understanding how symbols function as a
way of recreating or restoring a lost object. To investigate this relation we
need to focus on how the symbol may be affected in its formal structure
while it is being formed in the mind and how its function can be altered by
defensive mental mechanisms.
In this paper we want to point out that a more in-depth understanding of
the mechanisms involved in symbolic representation will give new dimen-
sions to the function of countertransference in the clinic and contribute to
clarifying its relations with the process of reverie. As part of reverie we will
examine the role played by evocation and figurability (Botella and Botella,
2005) in the human mind and in the process of working-through. Finally,
our reflections based on the examination of a patient with a severe difficulty
in relating to the meanings of the symbols produced by him will underscore
the importance of the analyst’s reverie (which includes in its operation the
processes of metaphorization) in the process of formulating the interpreta-
tion.
Ogden (1997) writes:
Reverie is a process in which metaphors are created that give shape to the analyst’s
experience of the unconscious dimensions of the analytic relationship. Unconscious
2
Images, for example.
Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

experience can only be ‘seen’ (reflected upon) when represented to oneself meta-
phorically.
(p. 727)
Within this context the analytic setting should be seen as a symbol incuba-
tor (Hartke, 2005), a place where representations and words present them-
selves (borrowing an expression used by Socrates) as logs spermatiks
(seeds that transform emotion into logos). Cassirer says that the mind is
symbol-mongering (see Innis, 2009, p. 34) These are nodal points of our
psychoanalytical understanding.
These reflections began when we observed a group of patients who intri-
gued us. They adhered to the analytic process, their dreams drew on quite a
large number of symbols, but they were not able to recognize the full meaning
of the emotional experience that appeared to be conveyed by the symbolic
forms3 used in their dreams. They seemed to have lost their ability to under-
stand the connotative4 (subjective) aspect of the symbolic representations
and only grasp its denotative5 (objective) side. The analogies involved in
denotation became indications of concrete equality as in symbolic equations.
Thus they were not sensitive to expressive6 aspects of the symbols conveying
potential meanings for the emotional experience represented. Freedman and
Russell (2003) discuss this kind of patient as people who de-symbolize their
experience. Here again we find points of convergence with these authors and
divergences. They suggest that de-symbolization presents three dimensions
and each of them has an identifiable symbolic form. We will suggest other-
wise that these patients attack their capacity to create or build up a symbol
in the very process of its creation and this phenomenon can be better
explained by the process of splitting off than by resorting to the mechanisms
of regression or disavowal. While these very interesting authors put their
stress on developmental aspects of the mind we will stress its structural
perspective.
We will examine one particular patient whom we consider representative
of this group. Individuals of this group were not as completely anesthetized
by the trauma they suffered as we might expect. Nor were they usually out
of touch with affective life in general. They did not have their capacity to
produce symbols, dreams and phantasies obstructed and also did not present
3
Langer (1930, p. 87, see Innis, 2009, p. 15) says that the form of a thing is ‘‘the way its parts are put
together.’’ Cassirer (1956) says ‘‘by symbolic form is meant here all the energy of the spirit in whose
structure a spiritual content with meaning is linked to a concrete sensible sign. In this sense, language,
the mythical–religious world and art show themselves as so many other specific symbolic forms. Because
in all of them is manifest the fundamental phenomenon that our conscience is not satisfied in just
receiving the external impression, but interlinks and penetrates all the impression with an act of free
expression’’ (Cassirer, 1956, p. 163).
4
Connotation: a meaning, ideas or associations, brought to mind or suggested by a word or thing apart
from this word or thing.
5
Denotation: a direct specific meaning as distinct from an implied or associated idea.
6
‘The most basic and primitive type of symbolic meaning is expressive meaning, the product of what
Cassirer calls the expressive function [Ausdrucksfunktion] of thought, which is concerned with the
experience of events in the world around us as charged with affective and emotional significance, as
desirable or hateful, comforting or threatening’ (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy).

what Pistiner de CortiÇas (2009) calls ‘detention’ of the projective identifica-

tion, as the patients mentioned in her book. Although they were intelligent
and sophisticated, they often made what appeared to be superficial,
irrelevant comments about the interpretations received and involved only
the concrete character of symbolic representations present for instance in
their dreams, treating them simply as analogies and rarely as metaphors.
They often oscillated between being highly cooperative with the analytical
process and periods of numbness which could not be explained just by a
hostile attitude towards their analysts. We were intrigued by this reaction.
Melanie Klein (1946) wrote:
Patients with schizoid features may say: ‘I hear what you are saying. You may be
right, but it has no meaning for me … The expression ‘no meaning’ in such cases
does not imply an active rejection of the interpretation but suggests that parts of
the personality and of the emotions are split off.
(p. 19)
With such difficult to reach patients, Betty Joseph (1989) proposes that
we focus our attention on ‘‘their method of communication, their own way
of speaking and reacting to the analyst’s interpretations …’’ (p. 85). In this
paper we suggest that it is also important to pay attention to the nature of
the attack that these patients make on the symbolic channels necessary for
them to communicate with their own selves.
Ogden focused on a difficulty ‘‘to dream the patient’s previously undreama-
ble and interrupted dreams’’ (Ogden, 2004, p. 857). We think that paying
attention to the method of communication and the way of speaking and
reacting to interpretations also involves examining the nature and limitations
of the symbolic mental representations produced by the patient, and the
mutilations these representations suffer as a consequence of attacks on the
activity of representation itself which will affect the way they think, feel and
communicate with themselves and others.
We will show that destructive impulses invade the processes of producing
mental representations and in consequence attack the structure of the sym-
bolic form while the symbol is still in the process of being created. By virtue
of this attack the patient will be cut off from the links that establish rela-
tionships to certain kinds of memories which are essential for them to
understand the meaning of what is being expressed in their mental life.
Our inspiration for this study was a formulation by D. Meltzer, which
associated Bion’s concept of ‘transformations’, a psychoanalytic idea par
excellence, with an expression used by the philosopher Susanne Langer
regarding the intrinsic logic that controlled the expansion of the meaning of
symbolic forms.
Meltzer writes:
But if we [were] to allow that ‘meaning’ goes beyond the perception of the gestalten
and that mental life goes beyond anything that one could [see] as a property of
computers ... We would need to take this concept as implying the possibility that
mentation is non-sensuous in its inception, that it is concerned with objects for
which forms need to be invented or borrowed from external reality, that emotion as

its central phenomenon and laws, are not those of logic or mathematics, but of ‘pro-
gression’ in formal qualities’ (Langer) or ‘transformations’ (Bion).
(1984, pp. 28–9)

This association of the nature of the evolution of symbolic processes
described by Langer with Bion’s concepts of ‘transformations’ and therefore
to ‘alpha dream work’ (which later originated the concept of alpha function)
appeared to provide a key to understand something more profound regarding
the mode of operation of symbolic forms in themselves from a psychoanalytic
perspective, the way they were attacked and mutilated, and their relationship
with their transformations in the processes of psychic work, including work-
ing through. In order to develop our argument we adopted the changes to
Bion’s concept of ‘transformation’ as proposed by Salomonsson (2007a). So
we are using the concept of transformation defined as ‘‘a semiotic concept
without any transcendental roots in an unknowable essence, we emphasize it
as a continuous process’’ (Salomonsson, 2007a, p. 1214).
The nodal change proposed by Salomonsson to the concept arises from
his criticism of the inclusion of the notion of an invariant in Bion’s mathe-
matical formula for representing transformation. Salomonsson insists that in
a linear transformation there is no essence and no invariant hiding in the
formula representing this function.
We believe that, by examining changes or expansions in meanings of sym-
bols present in dreams, we can better understand how transformations (as
we are now using the concept as a semiotic entity based on Bion’s original
idea) operate in the ego. These processes can be better observed when taking
place in dreams as they are the privileged domain of visual representation
or figurability (presentational symbolism) in their pure form. We would like
to point out another difference between our ideas and those of Freedman
and Russell (2003). While they focus more on the narrative forms of
symbols, we are underlining their visual ⁄ presentational aspect.
The problem observed in clinical practice: Dreams, symbols

and figurability
We would now like to illustrate these ideas clinically, using the material of a
patient who began a re-analysis to continue therapeutic work that had been
interrupted a few years earlier. During the course of this second analysis he
was diagnosed with cancer. This produced a major depression that led to
psychiatric hospitalization and the interruption of analysis.
He was a man of nearly 60 when beginning analysis, who had emigrated
several times as a child. His mother was a Holocaust survivor. His father
and the rest of the family including a brother died in a concentration camp.
After the initial emigration he was obliged to emigrate again, due to politi-
cal circumstances that placed his family at risk.
He said that his childhood and adolescence were dominated by poverty,
and that he was greatly shaped by the early migrations. He felt that he had
always had to start all over again, learn new languages and struggle against
hostile environments.

In the fifth year of analysis he said that he felt much better and happier,
and was very grateful to the analyst for the help received. He did not have
any plans to interrupt analysis at that time. He was a cooperative patient
who brought dreams and rich associations and appeared to make good use
of the interpretations.
Suddenly, on receiving the diagnosis of a malignant prostate tumor, he fell
into a deep depression. He stopped working, no longer talked, stopped eating
and no longer left his bedroom where he took refuge in the dark. He underwent
successful surgery but his recovery was very difficult. He became incontinent
for a time, sexually uninterested and impotent, believing that these conditions
were permanent, although the physicians said the contrary. He was treated
with antidepressants and mood stabilizers and also underwent five sessions of
electroshock therapy. During his convalescence, the analyst made several
suggestions to the patient and his family, about his returning to analysis as
soon as possible, but both the patient and his family were against it. Four
months after surgery, saying that he already felt better because of the antide-
pressant medication, he decided to return to analysis. He was still very
depressed but had already started to communicate with people again, and to go
out and work. He went back to having four sessions a week.
This depressive episode provided the conditions for the analyst to observe
how his patient’s symbolic mental life operated and was obstructed by his
emotional condition and allowed us to draw some hypotheses about the
evolution of the symbolic representations.
During one of these sessions he reported a dream: He was piloting an
airplane that suddenly had a damaged piston, and had to make an emergency
landing. But no airport allowed it to land because it was registered in Burundi,
considered a wild country. Everyone [he says] was contemptuous of this coun-
try of poor, uncivilized blacks. The airplane crashed but he survived although
blind and severely injured. As the dream had been told at the end of the
session, the analyst did not discuss it.
At the next session he reported another dream: The Israeli air force was
bombing the Teheran nuclear power station. He was one of the pilots. His
plane was hit, he was losing fuel and engine power, and was going to have to
make an emergency landing. Again, as in the previous dream, there were no
airports available since all those in the region were located in territory that
belonged to the enemies of Israel.
When associating, he said that the sky over Teheran was gray and, since
the planes were yellow, they were easy targets.
Looking at both dreams, he said he did not have many associations,
except the obvious ones: the yellow color of the airplanes was taken from
the yellow Star of David which all Jews were obliged to wear during the
Nazi period. Burundi was an insignificant country, destroyed by war, and
was possibly a reference to the way he himself felt.
The analyst pointed out to him that perhaps the dreams really had
something to do with the way he felt at this time, in a very difficult situation,
helpless, humiliated, discriminated against and impotent, afraid that he might
not survive. This reminded him of his past as a child and adolescent when he
felt the same way, and this connection reinforced all his current fears.

Since the patient did not react, the analyst decided to expand and to
stress some points in his interpretation. He suggested that the damaged pis-
ton was the analog representation of his prostate and penis, which he felt
had been definitively damaged, resulting in a disastrous landing after sur-
gery. In other words, when he got down to earth he touched what appeared
to him a catastrophic reality, against which the only protection would be to
become blind to his feelings.
Then the analyst, moved by an increasing anxiety due to a strong feeling
that he was not making contact with the patient, continued to insist by
detailing even more his interpretation. The yellow of the airplanes was
connected to a period in his life in which the fear of not surviving predomi-
nated, and the humiliation to which he had been submitted because he was
a Jew facing the real danger represented by Nazism. The analyst also sug-
gested that he was experiencing the present situation regarding his prostate
as one mixed with states of mind from the past, when he also lived in great
uncertainty and fear that he would not survive. He then added what he
believed to be the most important part of the interpretation – that this
emotional attitude was interfering with the possibility of emerging from his
current traumatic experience. He pointed out to him that the problem he
was facing was related to the self-contempt stirred up by his impotence, and
the terror of helplessness that this instilled in him now.
In retrospect it seems to us that the analyst, on insisting in detailing his
interpretation, was expressing his despair in not being able to get the patient
to react emotionally to what seemed such a clear representation in his
dreams. This communication via projective identification produced in the
analyst a deep feeling of isolation and incommunicability.
Mr. C. reacted with apparent indifference to these interpretations although
afterwards during the session he did not seem distant or cold. He said that
nothing the analyst said made much sense.
In a later session, he remarked that he did not believe that something
completely material and mechanical, such as an airplane or piston, meant
anything. He did not think that it had anything to do with him, and
thought that analysis could not help him in this concrete traumatic situa-
tion. He was impotent, possibly about to die, or rather, already dead. The
use of the terms ‘material’ and ‘mechanic’ drew the attention of the analyst.
The analyst then interpreted that the patient’s reaction to what he had
said in the previous session about the dream reflected what was going on in
his mind in its functioning as we could see happening now. He then
suggested that his reaction illustrated the very problem that he was experi-
encing: That is, he maintained a mechanical and concrete relationship with
himself and with his problem, which is why he felt dead. The killing of the
analyst’s interpretation contributed to this state of mind.
It is interesting to note that the patient, while denying any significant
relationship with the analyst and understanding of his interpretations,
apparently functions in a manner inconsistent with what he feels con-
sciously. Thus this patient continues to produce dream images for analysis
and comes to his sessions. We think that this is a consequence of mental
activity that continuously seeks to make the mind clear to itself.

Laplanche (1987, p. 58) mentions an expression used by Daniel Lagache,

when he talks of the ‘Zeigarnik effect’ (referring to Bluma Zeigarnik, a
Russian psychologist who proposed this effect in 1927), i.e. the need to
accomplish mental tasks that have not been completed. Lagache brought
this term to psychoanalysis to highlight the fact that unconscious problems
or psychic conflicts that have not had a satisfactory emotional solution are
still thought about unconsciously using the representative and expressive
instruments available at that time. We could add that the perfect tool to
observe the ‘Zeigarnik effect’ is the symbol in its formal aspects since it also
holds within it a demand for progression.
We asked ourselves, what could be happening with this patient? On the
one hand, he has some contact with his emotional experience that leads him
to produce a dream comprised of sophisticated symbols. On the other hand,
he appears not to have the slightest notion of the emotional experience that
seems to be conveyed by the dream in his working through process as we
can see it taking place (or not taking place).
How does this attack on the capacity for feeling or relating to the symbols
of his dreams take place?
Following Freedman and Russell (2003) we could explain this reaction by
resorting to their concept of desymbolization and say that either he is mak-
ing symbolic equivalences between two kinds of experiences and therefore
his thought was very concrete, or he was relying on disavowal in order to
deny what he did not want to know.
We see two problems with these explanations: firstly, by adopting either
(or both) possibilities we would be explaining why he functions this way but
not how he does that; and, secondly, both possibilities imply a unified con-
ception of the mind. The patient would be seen as not allowing two spheres
of the mind to connect or link.
We prefer to suggest a third explanation that: (a) the mind is not unified
but split in two parts functioning according to two different kinds of logic
based on a restriction of the expressive side of the symbols used to represent
his emotional situation; and (b) the links between the two situations (the
real and the dreamed one) never existed so the feelings could not submitted
to disavowal. The absence of the linking was due to an inner attack to
the expressive side (one of its formal qualities which did not progress) of the
symbol. In these circumstances the two disastrous situations, that is, the one
associated to the feelings about his cancer and the other associated to the
airplane crash, were lived as two different experiences.
Consequently we do not believe that what is happening could be explained
solely by the transformation of K into –K, or by attributing it to attacks on
links (Bion, 1962). We believe that this could only be the end result of a
long process.
An initial discussion: visual images, representation and

expression
We think that traumatic experience or an overflow of intense emotions
affects above all people’s capacity to react to the connotative ⁄ expressive

aspects of symbols. They lose their plasticity and silence the emotions, iso-
late the patient and thus cut off the patient from their meanings, as in this
particular case that we are discussing.
We suggest that it is the expressiveness of the symbol that will or will not
allow the patient to learn from emotional experiences and thus promote
semiotic transformations (Salomonsson, 2007b). When the mental repre-
sented emotional experience does not expand from its symbolic base, the
mind is prevented from putting to work its containing function (we are still
following Salomonsson [2007b, p. 1214] in considering containment as a
semiotic interaction) and benefit from the dialectical movement between
PS–PD as it is blocked.
The emotional experience that the symbol represents may be only partially
accessible for the patient’s interpretation and reflection (and ⁄ or for the ana-
lyst’s as well). To be able to think about the emotional experience and thus
free oneself from its restricted meaning, such experience needs to acquire a
connotative quality. Only after this evolution is it possible to link to other
experiences that function as triggers opening other affective networks and
contribute towards the symbol’s acquiring (or recovering) its full meaning.
At this point the issue arises not only of how the patient attacks the relation
with the analyst as a source of meaning, but how his emotional response
affects the very form of the symbol, thus creating a vicious cycle.
This situation leads us to the question: how do symbols mature or
progress in their capacity to transmit meaning? Langer (1942) replies: ‘‘By
progression in formal qualities’’. Symbolic systems arise through the process
of symbolic transformations, the key idea around which Philosophy in a
New Key turns. Cassirer (1956) complements:
Symbolic forms are the stable result of a form-giving process, a morphogenesis,
which operates in a field which first depends on individual cognitive processes, e.g.
on brain dynamics, where a steady flow of multi-sensorial inputs, memory retrievals
and the construction of imaginary forms contribute to a hyper-complex but unstable
product. Only invariants which may be extracted from these dynamics can control
stable behavior.
(Innis, 2009, p. 30)
Reflections on the problem observed in clinical work

Psychic work is still active in the sessions we presented, but the capacity to
work through as we can observe it in the privileged space of dreams and its
associative context is paralyzed. The patient is emotionally competent to
produce a symbology that can present, but only in the sense of showing
denotatively the situation he is experiencing with very limited capacity to
grasp the expressive aspects of what these emotional situations compacted
into images are exemplifying. As they lack the capacity for connotation they
do not evoke emotions in their creator. In these circumstances presentational
symbolism is impoverished, or even prevented from migrating to the discur-
sive level because its expressive function is blocked. In these circumstances
as well the integration of split-off parts of the ego is blocked by the lack of

symbolic tools to establish communications between the experiences lodged

in each of them
Michael Rustin (2008) writes:
One of Bion’s crucial discoveries was that what mattered both in states of extreme
mental disorder, and from the earliest moments of personality development, was
not only differences between primary emotions and desires and their objects, but
also the forms of thought by means of which such states of feeling were expressed,
communicated and contained.
(p., our italics)

Thomas Ogden and A. Ferro have been developing an insightful investiga-
tion of the evocative processes produced in the analyst’s mind as a result of
interaction during the session. Both Ogden and Ferro are interested in the
processes of building an interpretation that could touch the patient emotion-
ally, from the experiences, feelings or memories in the analyst’s mind,
coming from the projection of mental elements that the patient cannot work
through. They are both interested in bringing together thought and
emotional experience. Sara and Cesar Botella (2005), adopting a different
perspective, return to the issue of necessary conditions for building mental
representations. We could say that all these authors are resuscitating the
concept of Darstellbarkeit [figurability] as set out by Freud (1900).
Ogden’s (2004) article This art of psychoanalysis: Dreaming undreamt
dreams and interrupted cries! initially appeared curious and enigmatic but
very soon we could see this title as a metaphor for what we are now discuss-
ing and as opening a seminal window into furthering interpretive technique.
In this paper he attributes the difficulty some individuals find in making a
change to their incapacity to transform emotional experiences by symboliza-
tion, referring to instances of undreaming of psychic work. Ogden (2004, p.
859) remarks that:
Dreaming is an ongoing process occurring in both sleep and in unconscious waking
life. If a person is incapable of transforming the raw sense impressions into uncon-
scious elements of experience that can be linked, he cannot generate dream-
thoughts and consequently, cannot dream either in sleep or in unconscious waking
life.
We believe that Ogden is elegantly describing the impact of not being able
to transform symbols (in their formal qualities) in order to produce a wider
variety of links through establishing new connections among emotional
meanings of the split-off experiences. By not being able to dream the patient
becomes stuck and frozen in certain states of mind because their minds can
capture only limited aspects of the meaning of their emotional experiences
as if they were able to denotate but not connotate when relating to their
dream content. They have lost their capacity for suchness (likeness) (Langer
1942; Peirce, 1992) and, in order to regain it, they need to dream (transform
symbols) again.
Freud (1900) mentions that, if we want to have a better understanding of
the relationship between the content of dreams and the thoughts of the
dream, we need to: ‘‘take dreams themselves as our point of departure and

consider what certain formal characteristics of the method of representation

in dreams signify in relation to the thought underlying them’’ (p. 329, italics
in original). In this way, transforming an experience or quality of the
patient’s internal world which is felt, but is initially un-nameable and very
frightening, into something symbolizable allows the patient and analyst,
from then on, to name the experience and think about it.
The analyst using reverie as part of the psychoanalytic function of his
personality begins to occupy virtually the function of transforming the
emotional experiences of the patient. In order to transform the patient’s
feelings projected into him, the analyst works with the feelings evoked in his
mind by projective identification, either giving these feelings their first
mental representation for non-mental states (synthetic alpha function)
(Caper, 2002), or changing the mental representation of unbearable mental
states, so that the experience in the newly created representation becomes
easier to assimilate by the mental apparatus (analytic alpha function). In
both cases the analyst is broadening the connotative aspect of the emotional
experience evoked in his mind.
We could then say that what we are suggesting in this paper is part of a
development in the study of the process of reverie. Together with the
authors already mentioned we are stressing yet another aspect of this intri-
cate and complex process. Reverie for us thus becomes an intense field of
communication, expression, construction, reconstruction and symbolic semi-
otic transformation. As a consequence for us, as we have already mentioned,
it is not enough (and is sometimes inadequate) to interpret the destructive
attack on the links which annihilate the analyst’s interpretation since by
doing so we might just increase his despair. We think that it is also neces-
sary to understand how the attacks are likewise interfering at the level of
the construction of symbolic forms itself, which will also impair the
patient’s capacity to relate to their symbols.
The question we ask ourselves is whether in these patients there would be
a lack of some quality in the symbolic form – which would then be muti-
lated? In other words, can the symbolic form be produced by the patient
without his fully living the emotional experience he expresses, i.e. intends to
evoke?
We are stressing that the semiotic transformations of emotional experience
(as part of a psychoanalytic working-through process) can be followed
through progression in formal qualities of the symbolic mental representa-
tion. We are using the term ‘progression’ in the sense that one symbolic
form may cover more of the affective and representational field and thus
can operate as a key that opens up more affective networks than another. It
is in the latter sense that we are using it. The function of this ‘progression’
is to render mental symbolic representation increasingly broad and at the
same time more specific. Meltzer (1978) says that the visual images used in
dream work, as the result of working through (transformation), increase
their complexity, sophistication and level of abstraction, and it is in this way
that the transformation or growth broadens the generality of the mental for-
mulation and likewise increases the specificity of its use. To the extent that
new emotional networks are open, new memories that were split before or

repressed become available through evocation to be integrated in the river of

meanings that constitute the mental life of the patient. The analyst, through
his reverie based on the feelings, images and experiences evoked in his mind
by the patient’s material, can access what the symbols represent in their
broader, denotative and connotative nuances.
These images evoked in the analyst’s mind by the patient’s projections are
developed in affective pictograms7 (Barros, 2000), which include all the
expressiveness of mental representation and become something that exists
between pure experience and the abstractions of these experiences.
We are suggesting that meanings are broadened as they become related to
other parts of the self due to the breakdown of barriers that prevent contact
with other emotional experiences. The hidden, absent and potential mean-
ings (Barros, 2000, 2006) can be grasped through certain images present in
dreams or evocations in the mind of the analyst. The emotional experiences
associated with meaningful images or scenes contained in a dream, on being
unveiled, release emotions that open up new connective networks of emo-
tional relations (meaning is a relation not a quality) and thus widen their
meanings, paving the way for other potential meanings to appear (Barros,
2000, 2006).
These associations between affective and presentational networks
prompted by the analyst’s interpretations through their connotative function
place the different split-off levels of emotional experiences under the same
emotional umbrella. By making different kinds of feelings and emotional
experiences which were split-off before cohabiting the same mental space,
new possibilities of relations between mental experiences are created and
therefore new meanings appear, promoting the expansion of the mind.
The integration of the split-off parts creates the possibility of a more
intimate dialogue between the internal objects, producing changes in the
meaning of previous emotional experience that can engender the unfolding
of those passions which give meaning to our lives and vary throughout time.
Our clinical material shows how the integration of split-off parts takes
place in two stages. In a first phase, when projective identifications diminish
and memory is activated by certain feelings associated with lived expe-
riences producing as such greater awareness of emotional experiences under
7
The term pictogram is defined in Paul Robert’s (1984) dictionary as a translation of ideas into figurative
and symbolic scenes. I use pictogram in a related way, to refer to a very early form of mental
representation of emotional experiences, fruit of the alpha function that creates symbols by means of
figurations for dream thought, as the foundation for, and first step toward, thought processes. Strictly
speaking, however, pictograms are not yet thought processes since they are expressed in images rather
than in verbal discourse and contain powerful expressive–evocative elements proper of presentational
symbolism, but are very different from beta elements (Bion, 1962), which are raw elements due to be
expelled from the mental apparatus, when they are not transformed by alpha function in alpha elements.
An affective pictogram has the property of becoming an abstract variable capable of containing several
similar (in meanings) emotional experiences.
In the process of being constituted and in their figuration, affective pictograms potentially contain
hidden and absent meanings, kept in a suspended state. This absence of meaning is not reduced to the
concealment of a presence. It consists more of a state of suspension, a reference to an absence, a
discontinuity which will never be overcome and which constantly compels the psyche to broaden its
instruments of representation. Representation constitutes a response to a permanently present absence
and consists of a discontinuity that will never be overcome.

examination, the split-off parts come closer together. From static the splits
turn to dynamic. In a second stage real emotional integration occurs as a
result of the widening of the connotative meanings of the symbols, first in
the form of images that then transform themselves into verbal expression.
The discursive symbolic form only has the power to change states of mind
if it can create an intimate association between the connotative aspects of
both presentational and discursive symbolism (that expand emotional expe-
rience by establishing new emotional links) and the denotative (connected to
the world of discourse). In this way it alters object configurations because it
reconfigures significant kernels of meanings (Green, 1999), and puts us in
touch with remote periods of our lives that until then had acted as templates
to attribute meaning to our emotional experiences (Barros, 2000, 2006).
These kernels of meaning act as poles that attract meanings like a magnet.
Our thesis so far is that it is through the progression of the formal
qualities of mental representation deployed in symbols that the thinking
capacities of affective life develop and become part of the process of what
was metaphorically called metabolization of emotional life by Bion and
other authors. This metabolization occurs due to the migration of meaning
across several levels of mental processing.
The second period of Mr. C’s analysis: The blockage begins to

move
We will now follow a second period in the patient’s analysis during which
changes began to occur. We could say that he began to have access to the
expressive ⁄ connotative aspects of the symbolic forms.
In this context we are considering the symbols as crystallizations of the
intuitions which may or not also take on an expressive form besides the rep-
resentational one. Essayists and novelists have insisted that this universe
could only be captured and communicated through art and poetry because
expressiveness is intrinsic to its essence. How can we see this problem from
the psychoanalytic perspective? In other words, what is the role of expres-
siveness8 in the non-discursive level, its relationship with discursiveness in
the mental world and in its relations with conscious and unconscious life?
Here we should say another word about ‘expressiveness’. This term comes
from R. G. Collingwood (1938) and Benedeto Croce (2002[1925]), and refers
to an aspect of art that not only intends to describe or represent emotions,
but mainly to convey them, producing them in the other or in oneself based
on the evocation of a mental representation colored by emotion. This qual-
ity of expressiveness in producing emotion in the other appears essential to
us to understand not only art, but also the affective memory and function
of symbolic forms in psychic life. One of the functions of expressiveness is
8
The connection between intuitive knowledge, or expression, and intellectual knowledge, or
conceptualization, between art and science, poetry and prose, can be expressed in no other way than by
talking of a connection between the two levels. The first level is expression, the second the conceptual:
the first can exist without the second; the second cannot exist without the first. There is poetry without
prose, but there is no prose without poetry. Expression is, indeed, the first assertion of human activity.
Poetry is ‘‘the mother tongue of the human species’’ (Croce, 2002[1925], p. 29).

to activate the imagination. Possibly both in psychoanalysis and in the crea-

tive processes of artists, it is the expressive character of symbolism that
arouses in the imagined forms and situations an epiphanic intensity9 even
greater than the real life situations, and therefore they produce such signifi-
cant changes.
We would now like to follow the moments of his unblocking (which will
be done by examining the changes taking place in the symbolisms used to
show and represent emotional situations) and part of the process of his
mental working. In order to understand this de-blocking it is essential to
follow the process through which the symbols used just to show, evolve into
symbols that exemplify; that is, they acquire the capacity of suchness.
This process underwent several stages. We will summarize them so that we
can think about how the working-through process operates regarding the
formal qualities of the symbols which interact dialectically with the content
of emotions felt and produced.
This second period lasted about six months. It was initially marked by a
countertransference in the analyst dominated by superficiality and a feeling
of boredom with what the patient said. Mr. C. spent his time during those
months describing irrelevant, endless situations.
The patient’s talk evoked in the analyst the impression of a flat world, an
endless road traveled along to the point that the driver became sleepy, oblig-
ing him to interrupt his journey in order to avert a major disaster.
During this period the analyst interpreted in different ways the patient’s
invitation to him to become isolated from his feelings in a cold, desolate
world, without any possibility of communication, as he probably felt. Some-
times more distressing content appeared, promptly avoided by the patient.
In such situations, the analyst interpreted the sense of imminent catastrophe
that Mr. C. appeared to feel in any situation that could produce anxiety (or
even simply make him feel something), and that it was preferable to sleep
through such issues than to face them in a lively way, if he kept awake.
These interpretations appeared to make some sense. We believe that at these
moments we were interpreting what Freedman and Russell (2003) attribute
to the defense of disavowal which produces a desymbolization. This
approach revealed only partially effective.
At a given moment based on the material and on his countertransference,
the analyst changed the focus of his interpretations, a move that made an
enormous difference towards de-blocking the patient when he felt that Mr.
C. was more alive and even slightly excited. He interpreted that he seemed
to be more excited when he conveyed to the analyst the part of him which
could feel despair and powerlessness, and then enjoyed watching the analyst
suffer because he was then powerless to help his patient. Retrospectively, we
might suggest that this interpretation made sense and that this insight pro-
duced feelings of shame at first and afterwards of slight guilt. We later see
the central importance of these feelings of shame and guilt in his changed
attitude to analysis.
9
The term ‘Epiphany’ is used to mean an essential manifestation or perception of nature or of a meaning
through sudden intuition which is at the same time simple and shocking.

These associations between affective (the part that could feel) and presenta-
tional networks propitiated by the analyst’s interpretations (the connection
between the images of the dreams and the nature of his talk), through
their connotative function, place the different split-off levels of emotional
experiences under the same emotional umbrella. By making different kinds of
feelings and hitherto split-off emotional experiences cohabit the same mental
space, new possibilities of relations between mental experiences are created
and therefore new meanings appear, promoting the expansion of the mind.
It was during this period that a close childhood friend of the patient died,
which was a great shock to him. He told the analyst that this death seemed
to have aroused him from a long sleep.
Third period
Shortly afterwards, he dreamed that he was playing with toy airplanes. He
was a child. This friend, then a boy, was also with him. They were competing
with their paper airplanes and, when C. was almost losing the competition, his
friend’s plane fell into a puddle. His friend cried a lot. C pretended [sic] to be
upset, but deep down, he told the analyst, during the dream he felt great
pleasure because the other’s airplane had been destroyed. Somehow there
were babies in the dream.
He said that he was shocked and ashamed at his feelings when he woke
up. During the session he remembered that the dream had a second part.
The friend’s mother was crying and saying that now the family would have to
move. Everything took place in a devastated, desolate part of the city called
‘yellow zone’. The city recalled a film where bombed-out Warsaw (victim of
the Nazis) appeared, but it could have been Berlin (the result of revenge).
The patient repeated with emphasis that he had woken up feeling very
anxious, sweating, unhappy, ashamed and angry at himself for his immoral
attitude towards his friend. He felt shocked because this dream had
occurred immediately after his death. The session was heavy and somber,
and the patient found it very difficult to think about the dream. We believe
that the fact that he felt ashamed and later guilty both for the pleasure at
seeing his friend crying over the destroyed toy airplane and for his pleasure
at torturing the analyst during the analysis created an atmosphere of inti-
macy within himself. Our hypothesis is that these feelings of cruelty, guilt
and shame came from related sources: that is, from a competitive and cruel
split-off part and from a second split-off part of the self that was trauma-
tized and frail with fear of loneliness and isolation. We think that for the
first time in his life he felt and looked at his loneliness related to his cruelty
and guilt from an adult perspective and these feelings were the trigger for
beginning a process of mourning. Tabbia (2008) suggests that in the internal
world mourning is the passport to cross borders between split parts (p. 6).
We might say that from this moment the split-off parts began to cohabit
the same emotional universe although still kept apart by some kind of
obstruction. This was a first step towards integration through establishing the
beginning of intimacy between divided aspects of the self. The static splits then
become dynamic.

The analyst remarked to the patient that he sensed that he had brought
this dream of destruction and devastation of the city in the external world
to express his discouragement at the also devastated internal analytic city.
This internal devastated city ⁄ world left him desolated, lonely and hopeless
since he also attributed to the analyst this devastated, that is, depressed,
state of mind. The analyst also suggested that, despite this, the guilty feel-
ings about what he had felt for his friend in his dream, which he probably
had also felt regarding the torture to which he submitted the analyst, had
created a certain intimacy and closeness between all of them and within
him.
His only comment was: ‘‘Closeness, yes!’’
The analyst then decided to approach a new angle on the matter that also
appeared to be present, which he considered the most significant part of the
interpretation. He said that this distant C., who simply watched, represented
a part of him that could not feel responsible for having produced the devas-
tation, that remained indifferent to the objective catastrophe, and that
believed it could only possibly be aroused from this torpor by sadistic and
recriminatory interpretive comments by the analyst. The reason for avoiding
responsibility for this destruction was related to the fear of humiliation and
shame if he accepted that he had something to do with his present state of
mind.
The analyst in turn felt that he had touched on something important but
felt somewhat uneasy, although he could not identify what about or why.
Several hours after the session, however, on thinking about it, he again did
not feel satisfied at the interpretations given to the patient. He thought that
something was missing: a piece of the puzzle was absent.
At this stage the analyst was basically naming and connecting the diverse
experiences, dream images and feelings brought by the patient and, in so
doing, propitiating a greater possibility of integration of different split-off
parts of his personality through attributing meaning to what he was bring-
ing to analysis.
During the next session, C. said that he had been intrigued by his dream
and that he had also thought about the previous dreams he had had imme-
diately after surgery. He remembered again that his fighter plane shot down
in the dream was yellow and that this was associated with a feeling of fear
and intense discomfort at anti-Semitism on the occasions that he felt victim-
ized by it and added in a low voice: ‘‘And sometimes ashamed for being a
Jew.’’ He also said that this experience was associated with the ‘yellow zone’
of the city to which he was to move, adding that the ‘yellow zone’ appeared
to be the description of a state of mind. He remarked that he had some-
times felt ashamed when he was the victim of discrimination, and that yellow
was the color of shame. None of these feelings had been mentioned at any
other time during this analysis.
Closing comments
The death of his friend recovered a feeling of lost intimacy between himself
and his emotional experiences that produced a significant turnaround in the

analysis and resulted in a better integration of the split-off bits of his self.
This, in our view, favored the dream as part of the working through which
until then had encountered obstacles in its capacity to produce broader
symbols and the recovery of the expressive ⁄ evocative power of the represen-
tations. We see this illustrated, for instance, in what happens with the color
yellow and the image of the planes over the months of analysis. The yellow
color initially was only connected to Judaism as a symbol of Nazi anti-Semi-
tism. It was a symbolism that only worked by analogy, with little power of
expression. During the working through process, yellow becomes associated
with changes in geographic areas, and particularly in a city (the patient emi-
grated four times), with devastation (already on a level that has discursive
elements), and finally with a state of mind, that, as we shall see, refers both
to an emotional state of the mother and of the patient. We can clearly fol-
low here the expansion of the connotative aspects of the yellow. At this
point we already strongly pick up the expressive–evocative aspect of the
symbol in the internal world. The airplane is no longer only the representa-
tive of the affected sexual and emotional potency. It is associated both with
the patient’s hatred of the depressed state of mind of the mother and with
competitiveness (a new affective network or field that opens up) as regards
the brother (the shot-down plane now belongs to the other), the analyst, etc.
The projective identifications to which the images refer us are more
numerous and more complex, and begin to show the confusion (generated
by conflict) felt by the patient about being the victim or perpetrator of the
destructive process. Secondly, it includes a presentational–expressive, with
expanded connotative dimension, form (it already evokes emotions and
releases new associations), although it has not yet done so at the level of
discursive symbolism. That is going to happen after the analyst’s interpreta-
tions. It should be emphasized that reparation is only possible by integrating
the parts of the self, and for this it assumes that the split-off parts
have developed an intimacy between themselves as a prior condition of
integration. This basically means that affective networks (or fields) that were
previously split and kept apart in the patient’s mind develop links between
each other (due to similarities brought about by the expansion of connota-
tive aspects of the symbolism used) and thus begin to inhabit the same
emotional universe.
The patient also added that something very weird had occurred to him,
and he felt deeply uneasy at that moment. He remarked that he did not
know whether he had told the analyst (in fact he had not) that his mother
had lost a child before him, who had died as a baby. Some years later she
told him that she had been devastated (according to him, the mother actu-
ally used this word) at the time. This happened in Europe, and he added
that, although he had never mentioned this, he vividly remembered that
when he told the analyst that he had been diagnosed with cancer, he
noticed, or suspected, that the analyst had felt depressed when he heard
about the news of his illness (this perception was in fact right!). He reacted
to this perception by feeling intense hatred towards the analyst although he
knew that this reaction was irrational. This hatred had contributed to his
interrupting analysis at the time, because he thought ‘of what use is an

analyst to me if he is as depressed as I am?’ The patient said that the ‘yel-

low zone’ appeared to have something to do also with this state of mind
tinted by angry feelings, and that it might well be a reference to his mother’s
state of depression in the past and his feelings towards her. The fact that in
the native culture of this patient the color yellow is associated with shame
and humiliation is meaningful too.
The devastated city (we would like to highlight that this, according to the
patient, was the word used by his mother in the past to describe her state of
mind following the loss of her son, and, therefore, it is already a discursive
element) probably represented his mother destroyed by depression, immersed
in the ‘yellow zone’ (a state of mind) because she had lost her other son
with whom she remained symbiotically connected. An unconscious belief
had become associated with this perception–intuition that the only way of
getting the mother out of this state of depression would be by cruel pressure
to resuscitate her. Here the idea of cruelty has a degree of importance. It
expressed both C’s anger at his mother because she was distant from him
and attached to this other child, and the unconscious belief (Britton, 1998)
that only an even greater pain could wrench her out of that state of mind.
In his mind there was a mixture of despair and sadism. But this situation
also created an internal paradox since the mother in the internal world that
he wanted to reinvigorate and win back was perceived as emotionally
destroyed. A collateral result was a huge feeling of guilt which due to its
intensity did not mobilize a desire for reparation, but the need to blind him
(to split himself off from the part of his mind that felt emotions). In this
sense he was a bad pilot of his hatreds, prone to having an accident and
getting hurt.
When the patient was diagnosed with cancer, he felt devastated and this
situation acted as a trigger for an immediate projective identification with
his mother of the past, who was also devastated. At this time he felt empa-
thy (in the sense given to this word by Stefano Bolognini [2008]) with her,
and this aroused a huge feeling of guilt because he had hated her so. For a
moment he understood his mother and sympathized with her. The guilt was
greater than he could tolerate, and to protect himself he became blind to his
feelings. (From the standpoint of mental dynamics this meant that to survive
the accident he had to make himself blind and he became unreachable.)
Hence the frozen character of depression faced with the analyst’s interpreta-
tions which did not mobilize any feeling in him. Here we have an elegant
illustration of what Melanie Klein called ‘memories in feelings’. Uncon-
sciously, in phantasy, the patient blamed his mother and his dead brother
(his rival) for all the sufferings he experienced on moving to other countries.
This is indicated by the fact that the mother says in the dream: ‘‘Now we
will have to move again’’ after the city is devastated, which the patient felt
as a holocaust and became confused, not knowing whether he had produced
the holocaust and, therefore, whether or not he was a Nazi or had been a
victim himself. His confusion was repeated in the complexity of the projec-
tive identifications involved when he was diagnosed with cancer.
Finally, a harmonious personality keeps in touch with its kernels of
meaning in an integrated manner and thus maintains a live contact with its

emotional history. We hypothesize that the capacity for expressiveness and

therefore the contact with more expanded connotative aspects of the experi-
ences depends on this live contact, above all, with more infantile kernels.
This emphasis on the importance of remaining in touch with the infantile
kernels of the psychic apparatus requires some reflection. In the child the
unconscious world is less distant from consciousness than in the adult. The
border between them is more fluid. Because the unconscious mode of func-
tioning is not discursive and is more closely based on intuitive contact with
internal emotional reality based on presentational connotative symbolism
which is the more proper form to carry mental states and feelings, it is more
subject to the anxieties and expressive forms of representation of experience.
Hence the greater dramatic and evocative power in the world of emotions
that also results in greater freedom of imagination from the conscious and
unconscious point of view. Riccardo Steiner (2009, personal communication)
considers Bion’s alpha-function as a semiotic function essential to feed
unconscious imagination. The relative loss of this contact with emotion does
not completely prevent dreams from being generated, but may render it dif-
ficult to grasp the emotions transmitted by the symbols, making them more
difficult to understand.
Past experiences on being transformed into memories become embedded
or embodied in a virtual dimension mediating between us and the real
objects (Innis, 2009, p. 63) These memories become accessible through visual
images (presentational symbolism) that virtually have a tendency to turn
metaphorical. ‘Metaphorical seeing’, as Langer understands it, involves a
semantic displacement from the primary object meaning which a symbolic
image, or symbolic functioning image, has to its transferred sense, a
displacement based, she claims, on a ‘‘logical analogy’’ (Innis, 2009, p. 64;
Langer, 1942).
Still on the symbolic level, we would say that the remembrance of the
friend and the experiences they lived in childhood did not get stuck to a lit-
eral sense but acquired a metaphorical sense which then produced the dream
situation. Langer (1942; see Innis, 2009, p. 66) says of symbolic presenta-
tion: ‘‘For the human mind on all levels and in all degrees of awareness is
obsessed with finding the appropriate symbolism for conceiving all dimen-
sions of its existence ...’’.
During this third period the images of the airplane in trouble, the dead
brother and the yellow color reappeared, now accompanied by new images,
namely, babies, devastated cities, anti-Semitism, references to the need to
move from one side to the other of the city. The affective networks evoked
and mobilized are now broader and more emotionally colored; in other
words, what we call progression in its formal qualities.
Although the images are the same, they now have much greater
evocative–expressive power, that is, they communicate more feelings to the
interlocutors. They not only represent an experience and ⁄ or a past situation,
they also now capture and communicate something through their expressive-
ness present in the expansion of their connotative meanings. This expanded
expressiveness is present in the formal qualities of the symbol, and from the
psychoanalytical perspective we can say that it will produce a change in the

nature of the projective identification used by the patient. This projective iden-
tification was no longer at the service of evacuating feelings. Thus it
acquires the possibility of putting these experiences into words, without
losing their emotional ‘import’ (a philosophical term) carried by the presen-
tational symbolic forms, with its ⁄ their expressiveness. They constitute richer
affective pictograms that contain both the non-discursive (intuitive) and the
discursive aspects. In this way they enable a reference to certain more
specific and unique aspects of the emotions lived in the session and in the
past. We should note that symbols have been transformed into affective
pictograms.
The babies in the dream represented both the helpless child and the dead
brother (a random victim of Nazism or exterminated by him in his
unconscious phantasy) and appear associated both with the devastation of
the cities and the mother’s state of mind. This captures the entire set of feel-
ings present in the past and intimately associated with each other, and again
evoked in the present. Perhaps for this very reason, feelings act as a mold
or template that attributes meaning to what is happening in the present,
thus blocking the possibility that the patient discerns between what really
occurred in the past and the extent to which the present repeats this situa-
tion. One of the reasons for keeping this frozen state of mind is that intense
feelings of guilt impeded the process of mourning from taking place.
It was only when these links were established that depression began to be
worked through by mourning and finally to lessen, giving rise to a more
reflective state of mind, producing greater emotional closeness with his fam-
ily, especially with his children. For the first time he genuinely missed his
mother. It is moving to note that, ten months later, in a spirit that we could
paradoxically call happy melancholy he organized a trip with his whole fam-
ily to Poland, where he had never returned.
Translations of summary
Überlegungen zu den klinischen Implikationen der Symbolik. Wir beginnen unsere Untersuchung
mit der Betonung der Vorstellung, dass der Prozess der Konstruktion eines Symbols an sich mit seinen
verschiedenen Komponenten und Vernderungen fr die zeitgençssische Psychoanalyse zentral ist, da
Symbole unentbehrlich sind fr das Denken und das Bewahren emotionaler Erfahrungen in unserem
Gedchtnis sowie fr die Vermittlung unserer Affekte anderen und uns selbst gegenber. Nach unserer
impliziten Vorstellung richten sich interne Angriffe nicht nur auf innere Objekte, sondern schließen auch
Angriffe auf die Struktur und Form mentaler Reprsentationen ein, bevor und whrend sie in Symbole
eingehen. Auf diese Weise dringen destruktive Impulse in den Prozess der Konstruktion von Symbolen
ein. Symbole kçnnen ihre Plastizitt verlieren und auf diese Weise die Emotionen zum Schweigen bringen
und somit den Patienten von ihrer Bedeutung abschneiden. Unser klinisches Material ermçglicht es,
unser Verstndnis darber zu erweitern, wie die formalen Eigenschaften der Symbole im Seelenleben
funktionieren und wie sie die Fhigkeit, emotionale Erfahrungen durchzuarbeiten, behindern kçnnen.
Zum Schluss werden unsere berlegungen, die auf der Analyse eines Patienten beruhen, der Schwierigke-
iten hatte, sich auf die Bedeutung der von ihm geschaffenen Symbole zu beziehen, die Wichtigkeit der
Reverie des Analytikers im Verlauf des Prozesses der Formulierung einer Deutung herausstellen. Diese
Abhandlung ist auch Bestandteil einer Entwicklung in der Untersuchung des Prozesses der Reverie.
Reflexiones acerca de las implicancias clı́nicas del simbolismo. Podemos empezar enfatizando la
idea de que el mismo proceso de construccin del smbolo, en sus distintos componentes y vicisitudes, es
fundamental para el psicoanlisis contemporneo, puesto que los smbolos son esenciales para pensar,
para almacenar experiencias emocionales en nuestra memoria y para transmitir nuestros afectos a otros y
a nosotros mismos. Nuestra idea implcita es que los ataques internos no estn dirigidos solamente a los

objetos internos, sino tambin a la estructura o a las formas de las representaciones mentales, antes y
durante su constitucin en smbolos. Es por este medio que los impulsos destructivos invaden los proce-
sos de construccin simblica. Los smbolos pueden perder su plasticidad y, as, silenciar las emociones,
aislando al paciente de sus significados. Nuestro material clnico nos permite aumentar nuestra compre-
nsin del funcionamiento de las cualidades formales de los smbolos en la vida psquica, as como de la
manera en la que stas pueden interferir con la capacidad para elaborar experiencias emocionales. Final-
mente, nuestras reflexiones acerca del anlisis de un paciente con dificultad para relacionarse con los
significados de los smbolos que produca resaltarn la importancia de la reverie del analista durante el
proceso de formulacin de una interpretacin. Este ensayo tambin forma parte de una exploracin del
proceso de reverie.
Réflexions sur les implications cliniques du symbolisme. L’auteur de cet article commence par
souligner l’importance pour la psychanalyse contemporaine du processus de construction du symbole
dans ses diffrentes composantes et ses vicissitudes. En effet, les symboles sont essentiels la pense,
l’enregistrement des expriences motionnelles dans notre mmoire et la communication autrui ou
nous-mÞmes de nos affects. Selon l’auteur, les attaques internes ne sont pas seulement diriges contre les
objets internes, mais galement contre la structure ou la forme des reprsentations mentales avant ou
pendant que ces derni
res ne se constituent en symboles. C’est par ce moyen que les impulsions destruc-
trices envahissent les processus de la construction symbolique. Les symboles peuvent perdre leur plasti-
cit, ce qui a pour effet d’touffer les motions et couper le patient de leur signification. Le matriel
clinique prsent par l’auteur permet de comprendre comment la qualit formelle des symboles op
re
dans la vie psychique et comment elle peut interfrer dans la capacit de perlaborer les expriences mo-
tionnelles. Enfin, travers l’analyse d’un patient ayant du mal entrer en contact avec la signification
des symboles qu’il produisait, l’auteur met en vidence la rÞverie de l’analyste et la faÅon dont celle-ci
accompagne tout du long le processus de formulation de l’interprtation. Le prsent article est galement
une contribution l’tude du processus de rÞverie.
Riflessioni sulle implicazioni cliniche del simbolismo. Questo lavoro verte sul principio secondo il
quale il processo stesso di formazione del simbolo nelle sue diverse componenti e vicissitudini sia di
importanza fondamentale per la psicoanalisi contemporeanea, in quanto i simboli sono essenziali per il
pensiero, per l’archiviazione mnemonica di esperienze emotive e per comunicare i nostri affetti a noi
stessi e agli altri. La nostra idea implicita
che gli attacchi interni non siano diretti soltanto verso oggetti
interni ma anche verso la struttura o forma di rappresentazioni mentali prima che queste si costituiscano
in simboli o durante questo processo. ð mediante tale modalit che gli impulsi distruttivi invadono il
processo di costruzione simbolica. I simboli rischiano di perdere la loro plasticit , rendendo mute le
emozioni e allontanando il paziente dal loro significato. Il nostro materiale clinico ci consente di miglio-
rare la nostra comprensione del modo in cui le qualit formali del simbolo funzionano nell’attivit
mentale e come possano interferire con la capicit di elaborare l’esperienza emotiva. Infine, le nostre
riflessioni scaturite dall’analisi di un paziente che aveva difficolt a rapportarsi al significato dei simboli
da lui stesso prodotti, metter in evidenza l’importanza della reverie dell’analista nel processo di formula-
zione di un’interpretazione. Questo lavoro fa inoltre parte di una ricerca sul processo di reverie.
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The International Journal of

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92:879–901 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2011.00402.x

Reflections on the clinical implications of symbolism

Elias M. da Rocha Barros and Elizabeth L. da Rocha Barros

(Final version accepted 13 September 2010)

Keywords: symbolization, symbolism, presentational symbolism, discursive symbolism,

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

functions, constituted by symbolic forms that are deeply embedded in the

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

what Pistiner de CortiÇas (2009) calls ‘detention’ of the projective identifica-

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

(1984, pp. 28–9)

The problem observed in clinical practice: Dreams, symbols

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Laplanche (1987, p. 58) mentions an expression used by Daniel Lagache,

An initial discussion: visual images, representation and

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(Innis, 2009, p. 30)

Reflections on the problem observed in clinical work

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

symbolic tools to establish communications between the experiences lodged

(p., our italics)

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consider what certain formal characteristics of the method of representation

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

repressed become available through evocation to be integrated in the river of

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The second period of Mr. C’s analysis: The blockage begins to

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

to activate the imagination. Possibly both in psychoanalysis and in the crea-

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Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

analyst to me if he is as depressed as I am?’ The patient said that the ‘yel-

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

emotional history. We hypothesize that the capacity for expressiveness and

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92 Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

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