Notes on symbol formation 1

Imagination in narrative medicine

“…Moreover, we verified the defensive and regressive, or progressive (De Zordo and Lis, 1990;Riva Crugnola, 1988;Rycroft, 1956;Segal, 1957) effects of the symbolization in these narratives.…”

Tattered scripts: Stories about the transmission of trauma across generations

“…Thus despite the extent of the analytic work I have engage with, I have until recently been unable to think, to make connections, to link, to be curious and to imagine a meaningful story (Bion, 1959;Ogden, 2005). I have been unable to acknowledge, what Bion termed, "the truth of what is" (Segal, 1981. Bion, 1962a.…”

“…No other thought or feeling was permitted. It was as if my maternal family unconsciously participated in an attack upon thinking, an attack on making experience available to thought in order for it to be metabolised, made available for symbolisation and thus worked through so that my grandmother could mourn her lost husband and her daughters mourn for their lost father (Bion, 1959(Bion, , 1962aFreud, 1917Segal, 1981). There never was any mourning.…”

Factors discriminating creative engagement on an unstructured task: Creativity and the Rorschach

“…Likely important to this distinction we are making between creativity and craziness is the capacity to actively use symbols as a means of communication, an important developmental task in the transition from concrete operational thought to greater complexity of thinking. Klein (1930Klein ( /1975 and Segal (1957Segal ( , 1991, for example, distinguish between the more concrete symbolic equation, in which there is no distinction between the symbol and the object itself, versus the symbolic representation, in which the symbol is used as a metaphor rather than concretely. This distinction not only highlights an important developmental achievement, but also can be a useful means of differentiating psychotic from metaphorical speech.…”