Symbolic equation is the term used in Kleinian psychoanalysis for states of thinking which equate current objects with those of the past, rather than finding a ''resemblance'' between the two sets.

Origins

Hanna Segal Hanna Segal (born Hanna Poznańska; 20 August 1918 – 5 July 2011) was a British psychoanalyst of Polish descent and a follower of Melanie Klein. She was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, vice-president of the International Ps ...

developed the concept of the symbolic equation in the 1950s, during her examination of concrete thinking in the schizophrenic. Its roots however have been traced back as far as Freud's ''

Studies on Hysteria ''Studies on Hysteria'' () is an 1895 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and the physician Josef Breuer. It consists of a joint introductory paper (reprinted from 1893); followed by five individual studies of hysterics – Breue ...

'' of 1895, where he noted how a phrase like a 'stab in the heart' could be concretised in terms of the original physical sensations behind it, so that "we find a symbolic version in concrete images and sensations of more artificial turns of speech".

Themes

Symbolic equations have been connected to the

splitting Splitting may refer to: * Splitting (psychology) * Lumpers and splitters, in classification or taxonomy * Wood splitting * Tongue splitting * Splitting, railway operation Mathematics * Heegaard splitting * Splitting field * Splitting principle ...

of the

paranoid-schizoid position In development psychology, Melanie Klein proposed a "(psychic) position theory" instead of a " (psychic) stage theory". Paranoid-schizoid position In object relations theory, the paranoid-schizoid position is a state of mind of children, from bi ...

; alternatively they can be seen as the result of a failure to make distinctions between self and others, or between real and idealised objects.

Examples

* Psychological trauma can lead to a collapse of the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, so that anything reminiscent of the trauma becomes by symbolic equation the trauma itself. *Anxiety in nursing is correlated with the varying ability to relate symbolically to patients: where the latter are seen as symbolising the nurse's own damaged inner objects, care can be provided with manageable anxiety, but where patients are symbolically ''equated'' with parts of the self, anxiety spikes, leading either to despair or to

grandiose In the field of psychology, the term grandiosity refers to an unrealistic sense of superiority, characterized by a sustained view of one's self as better than others, which is expressed by disdainfully criticising them (contempt), overinflating ...

attempts at healing.

Alternate usages

*In classical psychoanalysis, symbolic equation is used merely to specify the object to which a symbol relates, as when

Otto Fenichel Otto Fenichel (2 December 1897 in Vienna – 22 January 1946 in Los Angeles) was a psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation". Education and psychoanalytic affiliations Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already ...

writes of "the symbolic equation money = feces". *For Jacques Lacan's linguistically based

Symbolic order The Symbolic (or Symbolic Order of the Borromean knot) is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Othe ...

, a symbolic equation would mark the presence of (unarticulated) meaning, prior to its entrance into a linguistic code.

References

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External links

Symbolic Equation
Defence mechanisms Psychoanalytic terminology