Symbolization: Representation and Communication

ISBN-13: 9781855755901 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 160 str.

James Rose

Opis

Because psychoanalysis is a science of subjectivity, it is no surprise that symbolism has been of central interest from its inception and early development.

There are few phenomena more obviously subjective than symbols. They conjure a particular fascination because of their enigmatic quality. For this reason, they manage to communicate something in an obscure manner. Thus, they partly hide. This duality and ambiguity approaches the fleeting and evanescent quality of subjectivity itself at its most subjective. Thinking in this descriptive way is not the most immediately helpful approach to understanding symbols as phenomena because it omits immediate consideration of how symbols are formed and how they are used by the individual and the groups that seem to form around them. Initially, the promise of symbols to the pioneers of psychoanalysis was based on their offering an access to the unconscious. Like dreams--and manifest in dreams--they promised to be part of the royal road to the unconscious.

This book is therefore assembled in such a way that the reader can trace the development of the understanding of symbols and their formation and use in its historical context and to try to look at their clinical significance. This is in the hope that the book will be of relevance and use in the practical sense as well as the theoretical.

Spis treści

Symbolization -- About the Editor -- Symbols: on their formation and use -- A connection between a symbol and a symptom -- Triangulation, one’s own mind and objectivity -- Symbols and their function in managing the anxiety of change: an intersubjective approach -- A psychoanalytic approach to perception -- A clinical paradox of absence in the transference: how some patients create a virtual object to communicate an experience -- Observing patients’ use of the psychoanalytic setting to communicate an experience of absence: the work of progressive triangulation -- Some conclusions

O autorze

Rose, James