Symbolic equation


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

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 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 of the paranoid-schizoid position; 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