Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2002, 47, 241–257

Symbolic attitude and reverie:

problems of symbolization in children
and adolescents1
Gustav Bovensiepen, Cologne

Abstract: In comparison to the 1970s and 1980s, we now treat more children and
adolescents who, because they have had traumatic experiences of violence, child abuse,
deprivation or chronic physical illness, are not able to adequately use their symbolizing
function. The question is which qualities and which analytical attitude we should and
can offer in analysis to help a child regain his or her capacity to symbolize, irrespective
of how poorly developed or blocked this capacity may be. In contrast to Jung and some
Jungians, the author argues that although the transcendent function is a ‘natural process’
and hence archetypally grounded as Jung maintained, the transcendent function does not
work spontaneously. Rather it requires a matrix based on the child’s earliest relation-
ship, which can later be re-enacted in treatment. Jung’s general concept of a ‘symbolic
attitude’ can be complemented and focused in a specific way through the use of Bion’s
concept of ‘reverie’, which contributes in a fundamental way to symbol formation within
the transference/countertransference. This idea is illustrated by clinical material from a
nine-year-old boy who suffered from a severe congenital intestinal disease and was
blocked in his capacity to symbolize. From the perspective of treatment technique, the
author shows how the drawing of ‘comic book’ narratives in a reciprocal exchange was
brought into the treatment. The drawings evolved in a way that he understood as a modi-
fied form of active imagination with children. The drawing process helped the boy
gradually to develop a symbolic space in the therapy and to contain a psychic space in
his mind.

Key words: active imagination, alpha-function, reverie, symbol, symbolic attitude,

transcendent function.

1
I would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of two Jungian colleagues from London: Jane
Bunster and Mara Sidoli, who died far too early and to whom I am personally as well as
professionally indebted. In the late 1980s, Jane Bunster worked in Berlin for two years as our
supervisor in the observation of infants, which followed Esther Bick’s method. Mara Sidoli and
I founded the International Workshop for Analytical Psychology in Childhood and Adolescence
in 1984. We cooperated closely for many years, and I learned a great deal from her. Not least she
and the other London colleagues of the SAP were instrumental in introducing me to Michael
Fordham’s concept of the self in childhood and to the ideas of W. R. Bion, whose thought is
intimately related to some of Jung’s own ideas.

0021–8774/2002/4702/241 © 2002, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
242 Gustav Bovensiepen

Introduction
Symbols play a key role in analytical psychology. Jung sketched his ideas
about the transformative function of the symbols of libido for the first time in
1912 in Symbols of Transformation, the work that caused the professional
split between Jung and Freud. In analytical psychology, a symbol expresses a
psychological function, which Jung later referred to as the transcendent function.
This function mediates between opposites and effects transitions between,
and transformations of, different psychic states. For Jung, this was the most
important psychological function, and he writes:
It is a natural process, a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of
opposites and it consists in a series of fantasy-occurrences which appear spontaneously
in dreams and visions.
(Jung 1916/1928, para. 121; author’s italics)

Jung considered this psychological function of symbol formation to be goal-

oriented and prospective. He was less interested in how it developed in the
infant psyche and how it worked. When we look at the specific issue of sym-
bolization in children and adolescents, we are thus confronted with the general
question of how the transcendent function develops.
It has only been since the 1950s and hence comparatively late that Jungians
have turned their attention to the perspective of developmental psychology.
Erich Neumann in Israel (1963) and Michael Fordham (1985) in London were
the pioneers of a post-Jungian Developmental School (Samuels 1985). It does
not surprise me that those Jungians working within the framework of develop-
mental psychology, that is, with infantile conflict and early object relations, or,
to put it in another way, with the inner child in the intersubjective practice of
transference and countertransference, are the most involved with other psycho-
analytic traditions. There is, for example, a large group of Jungians who have
taken a closer look at Kohut’s psychology of the self and at current infant re-
search (Jacoby 1999). There is also the work of Michael Fordham in London,
which has been strongly influenced by post-Kleinian views, particularly those
of W. R. Bion.
Twenty-five years ago in Berlin, I myself did my analytical training at an
institution housing both a post-Freudian and a Jungian institute. Even today,
several of my Jungian colleagues and I frequently experience a certain gap
between Jung’s topical theoretical conceptions of the unconscious and trans-
formability of the psyche and his lack of theory for analytic technique. This
gap is acutely visible in the realm of symbols and symbol formation, an area
which, ironically, has been thoroughly researched by Jungians. Or perhaps, to
express it more poetically, Jungians like ourselves too often have our heads in
the clouds, and we can learn from psychoanalytical treatment technique to
bring us back down to earth.
In comparison with the past, we now treat more children and adolescents
who, because they have had traumatic experiences of violence, child abuse,
Symbolic attitude and reverie 243

deprivation or chronic physical illness, are not able to adequately use their
symbolizing function. There is a consensus among most child analysts and
child psychotherapists, irrespective of their theoretical tradition, that the usual
method of treating children which was developed from working with neurotic
children, is not always appropriate for heavily traumatized children. One
reason for this is that these children frequently lack the ability to play. To use
Hanna Segal’s term for it, they have not managed to create an adequately
functioning psychic space during the course of their development (Segal 1991).
Psychic space and the transcendent function are the conceptual background of
this paper.
Within this framework, I shall concentrate on two issues. The first of these
is the symbol and the ability to symbolize, as they are used in the Jungian
tradition. Secondly, with an eye to treatment technique, I am interested in deter-
mining which qualities and which analytic attitude we should and can offer in
analysis, in order to help a child regain his or her capacity to symbolize,
irrespective of how poorly developed or blocked this capacity may be.
I treated a boy who had suffered from a traumatic colon disease since birth.
As a result, he had not been able to develop enough psychic space or make
adequate use of the transcendent function in symbolizing. I shall draw on this
material to illustrate my hypothesis. I shall investigate Jung’s claim that the
transcendent function can only unfold if we succeed in assuming the analytical
attitude that he called the ‘symbolic attitude’. This is one of the few of Jung’s
concepts from which he explicitly deduced a treatment technique, that of
active imagination. Since the prerequisite of active imagination is a differ-
entiated and stable ego, it is not, in my opinion, an appropriate technique
for patients who are structurally disturbed at an early developmental level.
I believe that the gap between Jung’s fundamental, but very general concept of
the analyst’s symbolic attitude and the analysand’s inability to symbolize can
be bridged by Bion’s concept of ‘reverie’ within the container-contained rela-
tionship. I include the earliest, mostly non-verbal exchanges between mother
and infant in what Jung referred to as the ‘symbolic attitude’. I therefore pro-
pose that, although Jung assumes it is a ‘natural process’ and hence arche-
typally grounded, the transcendent function does not work spontaneously,
but requires a matrix, which is based on the child’s earliest experience of a
relationship and which can later be re-enacted in treatment.

Tom: I don’t need to be understood – container/contained and reverie

Before I address some of the theoretical aspects of my subject, I should like to
describe the early stage of the treatment of the ten-year-old boy, whom I shall
call Tom. I will fill in more clinical material from this case later in the paper.
From the first session onwards, Tom was intent on making me understand
that he could survive perfectly well without being emotionally understood,
and that he did not need empathic sympathy or an understanding of sense and
244 Gustav Bovensiepen

meaning as ‘nourishment’, in order to thrive psychologically. In our sessions,

he was primarily preoccupied with inventing guessing games, like those on
a quiz show, which he had to win. When I could not come up with either a
question or an answer fast enough, he got very angry, derided me, jumped up
and down on the couch or around the room, threw pillows at me, and tried to
involve me in violent boxing and biting matches. After such eruptions, which
were rife with lust, aggression, and agitation, he would lie down on the couch
or roll around in the bean-bag chair. He seemed to be in a bad mood and
apathetic; he seemed, above all, to be completely drained and absent-minded.
After a while, just when I was able to start thinking about our being together,
he would greedily and tyrannically challenge me to come up with a new game
at once. If I did not give in to his demands immediately, but instead said
something like, ‘Now you feel completely empty and you think you would feel
better if I made something up for you’, he did not reply with words, but
instead moaned loudly and squeezed his buttocks together as if having a bowel
movement, and farted with abandon. Or he would swallow air and belch
saying, ‘That’s your punishment!’
I should like to use this episode to briefly introduce some of Bion’s concepts
in order to relate them to Jung’s conception of symbols. It is typical in treat-
ment that children first fight against the verbal formulation of the analyst’s
thoughts. Tom’s farting and belching, his ‘replies’ to my efforts to understand
him and his extremely dictatorial quizzes, struck me as rather desperate and
omnipotent attempts to destroy my ability to think about him with emotional
sympathy, my capacity to contain. In other words, he wanted to destroy my
ability to absorb his emotional emptiness and his fears, contain them within
me and work through them to the extent that he himself would then be able
to make use of my expressed understanding. He wanted to force me to match
him perfectly. In my view, his eruptions represented an expression of his
defences of the self, as Fordham has described them, as a way of protecting his
self against psychic breakdown (Fordham 1985). The tyrannical question-and-
answer game is a typical product of the initial stages of treatment, when the
child and the therapist are trying to work out what the other is thinking.
O’Shaughnessy emphasizes how much time is taken up in treatment by the
patient’s anxiety that the analyst will not understand him or her. She writes,
At depth this is anxiety about the analyst’s capacity for ‘reverie’, in Bion’s sense. A
patient wants understanding based on actual events of emotional containment, he
wants his analyst to be open to his first mode of thinking – viz, to communication
by projective identification. Can the analyst receive primitive projected states and
know what they are?

(O’Shaughnessy 1988, p. 187)

One could interpret the belching and the farting simply as the oral-aggressive
and anal-aggressive venting of drives void of any symbolic meaning. In the
language of Bion’s theory of thinking, they are beta-elements, that is to say,
Symbolic attitude and reverie 245

raw elements of perception cast as sensual and emotional experiences, which,

however, cannot be represented. With the help of a psychological function, to
which Bion has given the abstract term of ‘alpha-function’, they can be turned
into alpha-elements, which means that they are endowed with psychic meaning.
Bion writes:

In contrast with the alpha-elements the beta-elements are not felt to be phenomena,
but things in themselves (author’s italics) … Beta-elements are not amenable to
use in dream thoughts but are suited for use in projective identification … They
are objects that can be evacuated … Beta-elements are stored but differ from alpha-
elements in that they are not so much memories as undigested facts, whereas the
alpha-elements have been digested by alpha-function and thus made available for
thought. It is important to distinguish between memories and undigested facts –
beta-elements.

(Bion 1962, pp. 6–7)

Apparently, Tom had to free himself from what were for him unbearable,
‘indigestible’ physical and emotional experiences that had surfaced in the trans-
ference. In the countertransference, I found him to be rather unbearable at
these moments. At the same time, however, I could not possibly evade him.
In terms of treatment technique, the problem was how I could put my alpha-
function at Tom’s disposal and achieve a condition of reverie, in order to gain
a ‘thinking space’ for myself in which I could assume a symbolic attitude and
prepare a symbolic space between us. In this context, Bion used the earliest
mother–child relationship as a model for his concept of reverie. Given sufficient
affect attunement, the mother intuitively puts her own psyche at the infant’s
disposal, ‘lending’ a container into which the infant can project his or her
unbearable affects, fears, and psychosomatic sensations. Through her loving
understanding, the mother turns these into tolerable experiences by naming
them and endowing them with subjective meaning or sense, which can then be
re-introjected. As we have learned through infant observation, there are cata-
strophic consequences when an infant retains no personal space in the parents’
fantasy and psyche, as when some parents talk about their infant as if it were
an inanimate object. When everything goes well, however, a mother consistently
and continuously endows the events of everyday life with meaning, including
the behaviour of her infant. In doing so, she is adopting a symbolic attitude.
At this stage, Tom hardly ever communicated in a symbolic fashion but
relied on projective identification. He did this by forcing beta-elements, the
farting and the belching, into me. In the light of his early lack of containment,
emotional experiences were apparently too painful for him, so that he could
not use his capacity for understanding and assigning meaning to them. His
transcendent function did not work. Hence, a tyrannical wish to achieve total
consensus dominated him: just as on a quiz show, there was only right or
wrong. Nevertheless, was there not some communicative meaning in his
farting and belching? Was it an expression of an unconscious fantasy or did
246 Gustav Bovensiepen

it retain a meaning that only revealed itself from a prospective point of view,
not from a defensive one? I should like to make some observations about the
symbol and the symbolic attitude, which I shall then relate to those ideas of
Bion that I have already discussed.

The symbol, the symbolic attitude and symbolic space

Jung’s understanding of symbols occupies a central place in his thought. His
ideas on this topic vary greatly throughout his writings, however, and are by
no means uncontradictory. That said, the symbol is also perhaps the only con-
cept that is directly relevant to the theory and technique of treatment, apart
from his 1946 article on ‘The psychology of the transference’. In symboliza-
tion, the effect of the transcendent function manifests itself. Jung writes that
the transcendent function expresses itself in ‘this remarkable capacity of the
human psyche for change …’ (Jung 1917/1942, para. 360); it mediates between
the body and the psyche. The symbol combines conscious and unconscious
contents and mediates the transition from the ego to the unconscious (Jung
1916/1958, para. 131). In other words, individual unconscious fantasies
express themselves in symbols in the same way as archetypal fantasies do.
The symbol not only leads to intellectual understanding, but also to what Jung
calls ‘understanding through experience’ (Jung 1916/1928, para. 184). In his
article ‘The psychology of the child archetype’, Jung locates the origin of the
symbol in the body when he writes:
The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality
every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus
a living body, corpus et anima … The more archaic and ‘deeper,’ that is the more
physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more ‘material’
it is.
(Jung 1940)

For Jung a true symbol is a ‘living symbol’. Another characteristic of a true

symbol is a surplus of meaning. All of its possible meanings can never be fully
understood, and much remains hidden.
Together with the assumption of a transcendent function, Jung’s conception
of the symbol results in an analytic attitude, the so-called symbolic attitude. In
1921, Jung defined this as follows:
The attitude that takes a given phenomenon as symbolic may be called, for short, the
symbolic attitude. It is only partially justified by the actual behaviour of things; for the
rest, it is the outcome of a definite view of the world which assigns meaning to events,
whether great or small, and attaches to this meaning a greater value than to bare facts.

(Jung 1937, para. 899)

I believe that Bion, with his concept of beta-elements, which he also called the
‘thing in itself’, thought of something comparable to Jung’s ‘bare facts’. Jung’s
conception of a symbolic attitude means that we endow events with sense or
Symbolic attitude and reverie 247

meaning in analysis when we succeed in establishing a link between inner

reality and the outside world and between personal and collective experience.
I believe that human beings are equipped with an innate need for sense and
meaning, and that this need enables them to create a link between objects,
just as do the drives, particularly those of love and hate. This need for meaning
which, even in children and adolescents, amounts to a search for sense,
resembles Melanie Klein’s ‘epistemophilic instinct’ or Bion’s ‘K-links’. The
symbolic attitude is not the same as these concepts, however, because it
possesses a prospective and teleological quality and because it is archetypally
grounded.
In treatment, the experience of a true symbol can lead to a deep feeling of
being understood and being connected. In contrast to Freud, Jung not only
regarded the formation of symbols as the psychic representation of the instincts,
he also believed that symbolic activity reshaped and transformed the psyche
(Jung 1912). In the struggle between the ego and the unconscious, Jung con-
sidered symbol formation to be ‘the production of a third’ (Jung 1916/1958,
para. 181) against the background of the transference/countertransference
(Jung ibid., paras. 145–6). An individual’s striving to differentiate between the
symbolized and the symbol, between the ‘bare facts’ and the ‘meaning and
sense’, is a triangulating attitude, which, in turn, leads to the creation of
an internal psychic space and a symbolic space in the analytic framework.
Referring to the Oedipal situation, Britton (1998) has called the psychic space
a triangular space. In the analytic situation everything which happens can or
should be perceived with a symbolic attitude. In this context, symbolization
takes place not solely in the semantic or in the iconographic realm, which is
important to bear in mind, since people often regard only words and images
as true symbolizations. In my understanding the analysis in its totality is a
symbolic space par excellence.
In relation to the transformative activity of the psyche, Jung’s ‘transcendent
function’ bears a certain resemblance to Bion’s ‘alpha-function’, which turns
beta-elements into alpha-elements. As we have seen, Jung regards a surplus of
meaning to be one of the most important characteristics of a true symbol.
Similarly, Bion uses the metaphor ‘unsaturated’, derived from chemistry, to
describe alpha-elements. In other words, alpha-elements are open for any
number of possible relationships and meanings.

From Tom’s treatment: the creation of a symbolic space

Prologue
Let us now return to Tom. There were surprising parallels between his chronic
physical illness and his psychological functioning. He suffered from a con-
genital megacolon or enlarged colon. This condition, which is hereditary, is
a disease of the intestines. Here, several sections of the intestines, particularly
of the colon, do not have autonomous nerve ganglia. As a result, no peristaltic
248 Gustav Bovensiepen

bowel movement can occur in these sections; to all intents and purposes, they
are shut down. Consequently, parts of the intestines are massively bloated
while others are constricted. Soon after birth, children with this disease begin
to suffer from diarrhoea and vomiting alternating with constipation. Although
food enters the system, it leaves it again immediately, without being suf-
ficiently digested or absorbed. If the illness is not diagnosed early enough,
heavy bacterial inflammations can occur coupled with catastrophic diarrhoea,
which can even lead to death. Usually, treatment consists of removing the
affected sections of the intestines during infancy but the remaining scars often
lead to a re-constriction of the intestines. Patients have to avoid certain foods,
such as sweets, fats, and fruit, for their entire lives, if they do not want to be
plagued by chronic diarrhoea and flatulence.
Tom was sent to me by a colleague who was treating Tom’s half-brother,
who was two and a half years older. My colleague got the impression that
Tom required immediate help. Tom’s parents told me that he was very restless,
that he constantly dropped things and that he never listened. He was said to
be chaotic and forgot everything immediately. His mother sounded extremely
angry and desperate when she said, ‘If you tell him something, it goes in one
ear and out the other’. Being strict or punishing him had been to no avail. His
father complained, above all, about his ‘extreme untidiness’. His mother was
also worried because he frequently seemed so absent-minded, as though he
was lost in his thoughts. She was afraid that he might be run over by a car.
She added that there was a great deal of jealousy between Tom and his half-
brother, who frequently threatened him and entered his room without being
asked, actions against which Tom could not adequately defend himself. Tom
also wet his bed. He wore nappies at night until just a short time before
treatment began, and he still wet the bed about once or twice a week.
Tom was not a planned child. During the difficult divorce from her second
husband, his mother, who comes from Denmark, became pregnant by her
future, third husband, a management employee in an industrial company. She
said that, physically, she had been in ‘great shape’, but that psychologically,
she felt overburdened. She had tried to breastfeed Tom, but he threw up
immediately and began to suffer from acute diarrhoea soon after birth. After a
few days, his mother said, her milk dried up ‘from one day to the next’. After
ten days, Tom had to go to the hospital, where his intestinal disease was
diagnosed. He spent most of the first year of his life in the hospital, and his
intestines were operated on repeatedly. Between the ages of one and three years,
Tom must have experienced his relationship with his mother as sadistically
intrusive, since she had to push metal pins up his rectum three to four times a
day, in the hope that this procedure would widen the constricted sections there.
Tom had little contact with children of his own age and frequently spent
hours by himself playing with Lego or doing puzzles. He repeatedly suffered
from indigestion with heavy flatulence, or from diarrhoea. Although he acted
up at school, he still managed to be a good student. While his mother told me
Symbolic attitude and reverie 249

this terrible story in a hectic, intrusive and determined fashion, I was never
able to establish any real emotional contact with her. The father remained
silent for most of the time. Despite the abundance of facts, everything she said
remained strangely flat and empty and two-dimensional. I could, however,
detect some feelings of guilt because his parents suspected that, as a result of
his many stays in hospital, Tom may have felt that they had pushed him away.
Tom was not yet ten when I met him for the first time. I was surprised by
how tall and heavy he was and by how vital he seemed. During our first
meeting, he bombarded me with tales of his life and his problems. Everything
sounded rather terrible but he recounted it in an emotionless, manic, and often
boastful and over intimate manner, as if he wanted to tell me that none of this
mattered to him. I had the impression that internally he was in chaos, like his
dissected and deformed intestines. He ignored or rejected any remark of mine
offering emotional understanding. There were brief moments when I glimpsed
a deep forlornness, but for the most part, Tom struck me as being filled from
bottom to top with a desperate anger. Towards the end of our initial interview
he spoke of becoming a policeman when he grew up, and he drew a picture of
a little black policeman who ‘shoots dragons and pours fire over them’.
I was a little surprised by the twist that it was the policeman who ‘pours fire’
instead of the dragon spewing fire, and I thought that both of them actually
looked quite friendly. This picture awakened my sympathy for Tom, which I
had not really felt before. In the picture, a strong red arc of fire connected the
head of the little, black policeman to the nostrils of the mighty, green dragon,
whose body was riddled with black bullet holes. I sensed that the dragon and
the policeman were also connected in a strongly libidinous way, with the dragon
perhaps personifying the entire dangerous and unintelligible chaos of Tom’s
intestines. The black bullet holes in the dragon’s body made me think of the
many intestinal operations Tom had undergone. I did not voice this suspicion,
however. Tom then left, with the assurance that he would like to return.

Excerpts from treatment

Tom came to treatment twice a week. I would have preferred it if he had come
three times, but I could not convince his parents.
As I have already mentioned, Tom tried to control and dominate me in a
very omnipotent and intrusive fashion right from the outset. He made it very
difficult for me to assume a symbolic attitude or one of reverie, or to develop
my own ‘thinking space’ in order to understand and consider what he was
telling me. The situation escalated over the next months as Tom became
increasingly aggressive and chaotic. During one session when he was in the
process of getting violent again and threatened to throw a chair at me, I told
him in an uncompromising tone of voice to stop. I also reminded him that we
had agreed that there would not be any physical fights and that neither of us
wanted to get hurt. In a more conciliatory tone, like a referee, I added, ‘that’s
250 Gustav Bovensiepen

against the rules here’. He stopped immediately and threw himself on the
bean-bag chair with a growl. I suggested that he draw what he would like to
do to me on the blackboard. He accepted the proposition and spent the rest of
the session drawing, in a rather aggressive manner, nuclear missile attacks on
the ‘Bovensiepen-Zombie’.
In our next session, he enthusiastically continued this activity, but without
any direct physical attacks. There were no physical attacks in the sessions that
followed, but the emotional atmosphere of tyranny, a desire for destruction
and total control, through which Tom wanted to enforce my complete sub-
mission, intensified accordingly. I told him that I thought he wanted to make
me feel how he actually felt when he had a fight with his elder brother who
forced his way into Tom’s room, namely helpless and defeated because he had
no way of defending himself. He confirmed my suspicion. For the very first
time, he accepted an intervention that conveyed an understanding of his
emotional state, and he began to express something of himself in words.
He spoke about his grandmother, whom he always visited on those week-
ends when his half-brother went to see his own father. Tom told me that he
liked being at his grandmother’s because she was not strict about following
his dietary regime. Then, however, he unexpectedly recalled that she had once
knocked out one of his teeth. I had the feeling that he was only half-joking
when he told me this, and I must have looked somewhat incredulous while, at
the same time, expressing my empathy. He apparently interpreted my mixed
reaction to mean that I either did not believe him, or at least did not correctly
understand him, or that I could not distinguish between a lie and the truth, or
– what was even worse – that I suspected that he could not tell the difference
and that I myself was lying when I commiserated with him! He reacted by
growing very impatient and angry, farting constantly, and saying that he now
had to go on a ‘revenge crusade’ against his grandmother. I did not attempt
to interpret his angry eruption as a grandmother or mother transference,
but instead suggested that he tried to depict this ‘revenge crusade’ as a picture
story in a comic strip. He immediately took me up on my suggestion, but
insisted that I had to begin. He then went to his personal box for the first time
in therapy, fetched a sketch pad and crayons, and divided a piece of paper into
twelve squares by drawing one vertical and five horizontal lines. When he
had finished, he pushed the piece of paper over to me and said, ‘Come on, get
going’. I hesitated for a moment since I was unsure about offering something
of myself when I did not really know what he needed. I had the impression
that he used his farting as an anal-aggressive attack to fend off his fear of the
‘bad’ non-understanding and intrusive maternal object, and that he felt I was
turning into the mother who was penetrating his anus when I tried to talk to
and understand him. On the other hand, I wondered whether his triumphantly
and omnipotently employed ‘ability’ to fart at any time was actually a con-
crete expression of his deeply rooted conviction that he could only produce
foul-smelling air in his chaotic psyche, which he had to communicate to me
Symbolic attitude and reverie 251

through projective identification. I also asked myself whether he was domin-

ated by the unconscious fantasy of a destructive parental primal scene, the only
product of which could be senseless thoughts, foul-smelling air, or a zombie
baby that had to be expelled.
Be that as it may, I sensed that it was crucial for him at this moment that
we could find a way to name his state of mind, entering into an exchange of
thoughts in the form of a pictorial dialogue. It was crucial that I offered him
something living of myself; he needed something that would give him a spark
of hope, even if this did not necessarily signify understanding yet. So, I drew
a relatively motherly, portly figure who greeted Tom, and he then drew his
grandmother being riddled with bullets. ‘You’re the grandma!’ he exclaimed
triumphantly. He then added in a friendlier tone: ‘But you’re not bad, we’re
only acting as if’. He continued working on the picture story until the end of
our session. It was an interactive game. He drew a scene to which I had to
react by drawing another scene, to which he reacted by drawing another
picture, and so on. The story primarily revolved around the grandma being
pursued and having to be annihilated, and she could only save herself by chang-
ing into another figure. Mercilessly and sadistically, Tom employed every possible
means to annihilate her, while I had to come up with ideas about how I/the
grandma could survive, which I repeatedly tried to accomplish with the help of
a transformation spell. Our session ended when the grandma retreated into an
atomic bomb shelter because she was being threatened by nuclear missiles.
Tom really enjoyed drawing these stories. For me, it was not the content
that was important, but the fact that this activity represented a nascent possi-
bility that we might be able to create a symbolic space, however temporary,
in which an intersubjective exchange of fantasies could occur without the
emptying of undigested emotional experiences and physical sensations: ‘we’re
acting as if’.
Tom kept returning to these picture stories during the course of treatment
and we continued to work with them. They became a consistent and safe part
of his inner world. Even though his therapy box was overflowing with chaotic
sketches and papers or plasticine figures, and he threw everything out every
few months, he took great care of his collection of picture stories, which had
to be filed and given titles. He frequently tested me to see if I remembered
certain characters and scenes or the names of the different stories. In this way,
a process of working through the anxieties and their defences could unfold as
they were enacted in the stories. For him, the stories seemed to represent an
object that gave him hope of not losing the mind-to-mind contact with the
therapist; metaphorically one could say Tom suffered from a ‘psychic
diarrhoea’. Slowly he began to feel how painful the experience of loss is, and
that his problems had something to do with being able to master his nameless
anxieties and chronic depression.
After about a year and a half of treatment, a relatively safe symbolic space
had been established within Tom. This was evident from the fact that he only
252 Gustav Bovensiepen

rarely tried in his tyrannical fashion to force me to submit, that he started

voicing his interest in my thoughts, that he was curious to find out more about
my private life, and that he wanted to know whether my colleague in the
practice was also my wife, whether I had children and so on. He also started
thinking about what might be going on inside his father when the latter was
having one of his frequent fights with Tom’s brother. Increasingly he was able
to assume an observing position, evidenced by the fact that his intrusive
sadism, born out of despair, was frequently replaced by an intrusive humour.
He wondered, for example, why so many random letters of the alphabet were
printed nonsensically on the back of the sheets of paper that I provided for
him to use in such quantity. I told him that my personal computer had spewed
out a large number of misprints. In response, he said with amusement, ‘Your
computer must have been thinking, “I’m going to bug the old man!”’
His ability to explore himself, to understand himself, and to achieve this by
other means than mere externalization developed very slowly. He no longer
reacted to my verbal interventions physically but instead answered in kind,
with verbal commentary. To my interpretations he frequently answered, for
example, that I obviously wanted ‘to intrude upon his private sphere’, or, ‘my
dear Mr Bovensiepen is one-hundred-percent gay!’
Nevertheless, for a long time, the scope of his denial of a basic emotional
need for dependence and his defences against a relationship based on under-
standing and meaning remained frightening. He sensed this and although he
continued to be unhappy and depressed, this was an important step forward
in his development.

Discussion
Tom is an example of a child who does not possess the capacity to contain and
is thus seriously impaired in his ability to symbolize. Although Jung may have
believed that symbolization is a ‘natural process’ based on the transcendent
function, I would like to modify this assumption, since, in clinical situations,
we are frequently confronted by patients who cannot symbolize at first. If we
understand Tom’s problems with symbolization as analogous to his problems
of digestion, we can say that digestion is a natural process, but it can also be
impaired. Following Jung, Verena Kast has argued that the complexes spontan-
eously unfold in symbols (Kast 1990). This may hold true for many neurotic
patients, but not for those with an undifferentiated ego-structure. Further-
more, this assumption focuses too heavily on the contents of the fantasies
or symbols. We should, I believe, place much more emphasis on the process of
developing a symbolic space, which results from the matrix of the transference/
countertransference and which, like the early mother-child relationship, can
lead to a transformation of emotional experience in a dyadic relationship.
I think that this concept fits well with Jung’s idea of the ‘symbolic attitude’,
which a mother also assumes when she succeeds in creating a place for her
Symbolic attitude and reverie 253

child within her psyche. With Tom, the most striking problem was his lack of
containment: he showed extreme and rigid splitting and ‘everything went into
one ear and out the other’.
If the symbolic attitude is primarily understood as a relational process
instead of an intellectual amplification of symbolic contents, this understand-
ing would expand our treatment options for patients who are, above all,
plagued by difficulties with symbolization. I believe that the symbolic process,
a ‘natural process’ according to Jung, can only ‘naturally’ unfold in treatment
if the therapist assumes an attitude that is as open and as receptive to his own
fears and fantasies as to the patient’s fears and fantasies. This is an attitude
that I believe is best expressed in Bion’s conception of reverie.
I would like to comment on an important aspect of Tom’s fantasies/picture
stories because it expresses facets of the transference/countertransference. For
a long time, the stories revolved around the idea that the persecutor and the
persecuted could only save themselves by constantly transforming themselves.
This is an archetypal motif that we know from many fairy tales: the hero, who
has been an apprentice to a sorcerer or a sorceress, for example, can only free
himself at the next stage of development by using the tools of his trade to
magically transform himself and escape. With his pictures, Tom showed how
he was identified with the ‘magical’ power of his mother complex as a part
object and needed to distance himself from this identification by means of an
escape through transformation. It took a great deal of time in therapy for him
to work through his identification with a powerful, intrusive mother introject.
My introduction of drawing picture stories can be understood as a modified
form of active imagination. For a while, drawing was my form of reverie, which
I had attempted at first to offer as the verbal reverie that Tom attacked so
violently at the start of treatment in order to master his anxieties. In contrast
to ‘classic’ active imagination, in which the patient unfolds his or her fantasies,
here, I had to become active first and had to offer something prospective of
myself. One could argue that he intrusively compelled me to offer something.
But this was obviously the right ‘food’, ‘served’ in the form of a living and
enlivening symbolized object relation, because Tom was able to accept it and
develop it further. I think the method also turned out to be the right one because
it enabled Tom to make his unconscious thoughts thinkable in order to satisfy
his need for sense and meaning.
In my view, Jung’s prospective function of the living symbol, which he
stressed repeatedly, corresponds to the above-mentioned need for a living object
maintaining the mind-to-mind-contact with Tom and the need for meaning in
Jung’s’ sense or for ‘knowledge’ as Bion puts it. Hence, the primary issue with
severely disturbed patients is not so much to interpret the defensive meaning
of the symbolism in relation to a lack or loss, but to help them to create the
hope of being able to think about lack or loss, being able to imagine before
seeking means to overcome lack or loss. This is what I understand as the pro-
spective function of the symbol. Anne Alvarez from the Tavistock Clinic, who
254 Gustav Bovensiepen

has made so many significant contributions to the treatment of severely dis-

turbed children, put it poetically, if you like, in a Jungian way, when she wrote,
‘We need symbols for sunset, but also for a new morning’ (1992, p. 168).

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Ve srovnání se 70. a 80. lety minulého století nyní léčíme více dětí a dospívajících, kteří
nejsou schopni adekvátně používat svou symbolickou funkci, protože mají za sebou
traumatické zkušenosti násilí, zneužití, deprivace nebo chronické fyzické nemoci.
Vyvstává důležitá otázka, jaké kvality a jaký analytický postoj máme a můžeme
v analýze nabídnout, abychom dítěti pomohli znovu nabýt jeho schopnost
symbolizovat. A sice bez ohledu na to, jak nedostatečně tato schopnost může být
vyvinuta nebo nakolik může být blokována. Na rozdíl od Junga a některých jungiánů
autor tvrdí, že ačkoli transcendentní funkce je ‘přirozený proces’ a tedy je archetypově
založena, jak říkal Jung, přesto tato funkce nepracuje spontánně. Spíše potřebuje
matrici založenou na nejranějších vztazích dítěte, které mohou být později
restaurovány v průběhu léčby. Jungův obecný koncept ‘symbolického postoje’ může být
doplněn a specifickým způsobem osvětlen užitím Bionova conceptu ‘snění (reverie)’,
který zásadním způsobem přispívá k tvorbě symbolů v rámci přenosu/
protipřenosu. Tato myšlenka je ilustrována klinickým materiálem devítiletého chlapce,
který trpěl těžkou vrozenou intestinální chorobou a jeho schopnost symbolizovat byla
zablokována. Z hlediska techniky léčby autor ukazuje, jak bylo při vzájemném
setkávání vneseno do léčby kreslení ‘comicsových’ vyprávění. Kresby se rozvinuly
způsobem, který chápal jako modifikovanou formu aktivní imaginace s dětmi. Proces
kreslení chlapci pomohl postupně vytvořit symbolický prostor v terapii a ovládnout
psychický prostor ve své mysli.

Nous traitons aujourd’hui beaucoup plus d’enfants et d’adolescents que dans les
années 70 et 80 parce qu’ils ont subi des expériences traumatiques de violence, de
maltraitance, de privation ou de maladie physique chronique et qu’ils sont incapables
d’utiliser correctement leur fonction de symbolisation. La question se pose de savoir
quelles qualités et quelle attitude analytique nous devrions et nous pouvons offrir
dans l’analyse pour aider un enfant à retrouver sa capacité de symbolisation, quel que
soit le niveau de développement ou de blocage de cette dernière. En opposition à Jung
et à certains jungiens, l’auteur avance que même si la fonction transcendante est un
‘processus naturel’ qui s’enracine dans une dynamique archétypique, comme Jung l’a
établi, elle n’œuvre pas spontanément. Elle requiert au contraire une matrice qui repose
sur la relation primaire qu’a connu l’enfant et qui peut être ré-activée au cours du
traitement. Le concept général d’‘attitude symbolique’ avancé par Jung peut être
complété et cerné d’une façon particulière en utilisant le concept de ‘rêverie’ proposé
par Bion, qui contribue de façon essentielle à la formation du symbole à l’intérieur
de la relation transférentielle. Cette idée est illustrée par le matériel clinique d’un
garçon de 9 ans qui souffrait d’une grave maladie intestinale congénitale et se trouvait
bloqué dans sa capacité à symboliser. S’intéressant à la technique de traitement,
l’auteur décrit le recours au dessin de bandes dessinées dans un échange mutuel. Les
Symbolic attitude and reverie 255

dessins ont évolué d’une façon qui lui semble être une forme modifiée d’imagination
active avec les enfants. Le processus de dessin a aidé le garçon à développer peu à peu
un espace symbolique dans la thérapie et à contenir un espace psychique interne.

Verglichen mit den 1970ern und 80ern behandeln wir jetzt mehr Kinder und
Jugendliche, die nicht in der Lage zu einem adäquaten Gebrauch ihrer Symbolisier-
ungsfunktion sind, weil sie traumatische Erfahrungen von Gewalt, Kindesmißbrauch,
Deprivation oder chronischer körperlicher Erkrankung erlitten haben. Es ist die Frage,
welche Qualitäten und welche analytische Haltung wir in der Analyse anbieten sollten
und können, um einem Kind zu helfen seine Symbolisierungsfunktion wiederzuer-
langen, unabhängig davon, wie dürftig entwickelt oder blockiert diese Fähigkeit ist. Im
Unterschied zu Jung und manchen Jungianern argumentiert der Autor, daß die trans-
zendente Funktion, obgleich ein ‘natürlicher Prozeß’ und somit laut Jung archetypisch
begründet, nicht spontan funktioniert. Vielmehr braucht sie eine Matrix, die auf der
frühesten Beziehung des Kindes basiert, welche später in der Behandlung re-inszeniert
werden kann. Jung’s allgemeines Konzept einer ‘symbolischen Einstellung’ kann
vervollständigt und in einer besonderen Weise fokussiert werden durch den Gebrauch
von Bion’s Konzept der ‘Reverie’, die in einer grundsätzlichen Weise zur Symbol-
bildung in der Übertragung-Gegenübertragung beiträgt. Diese Idee wird illustriert
anhand klinischen Materials von einem neun Jahre alten Jungen, der an einer schweren
angeborenen Erkrankung des Magen-Darm-Traktes litt und in seiner Fähigkeit zu
Symbolisieren blockiert war. Vom Standpunkt der Behandlungstechnik zeigt der Autor,
wie das Zeichnen von ‘Comic’ Erzählungen in einem reziproken Austausch in die
Behandlung gebracht wurde. Die Zeichnungen entwickelten sich in einer Weise, die er
als modifizierte Form von aktiver Imagination mit Kindern auffaßte. Der Zeichen-
Prozeß half dem Jungen, nach und nach einen symbolischen Raum in der Therapie zu
entwickeln und einen psychischen Raum in seiner Psyche zu halten.

Rispetto agli anni ’70 e ’80, noi ora trattiamo più bambini e adolescenti che, a causa
di esperienze traumatiche di violenza, abusi infantili, deprivazione o malattie fisiche
croniche, non sono in grado di usare adeguatamente la funzione di simbolizzazione. La
questione è quali qualità e quale atteggiamento analitico noi dovremmo e possiamo
offrire in analisi per aiutare un bambino a riguadagnare la sua capacità di simbolizza-
zione, indipendentemente da quanto scarsamente sviluppata o bloccata tale capacità
possa essere. Contrariamente a Jung e ad alcuni junghiani, l’autore sostiene che,
sebbene la funzione trascendente sia un ‘processo naturale’ e quindi fondata in modo
archetipico, come sosteneva Jung, tale funzione non si attiva spontaneamente. Amzi, ha
bisogno di una matrice basata sulla relazione primaria del bambino, che può più tardi
essere riattivata durante la terapia. Il generico concetto junghiano di un ‘atteggiamento
simbolico’ può essere completato e specificato con l’uso del concetto bioniano di ‘reverie’,
che contribuisce in modo fondamentale alla formazione del simbolo all’interno della
relazione di transfert-controtransfert. Tale idea viene illustrata con il materiale clinico
di un bambino di nove anni che soffriva di un grave disturbo intestinale congenito ed
era bloccato nella sua capacità di simbolizzare. Come tecnica terapeutica l’autore
mostra in che modo, attraverso una scambio reciproco, venne inserito nel trattamento
il disegno di ‘racconti comici’. I disegni si sviluppavano in un modo che egli comprese
256 Gustav Bovensiepen

come una forma modificata di immaginazione attiva con i bambini. Il disegnare aiutò
il bambino a sviluppare gradualmente uno spazio simbolico nella terapia e a contenere
uno spazio psichico nella sua mente.

Comparándonos con los 70 y los 80, actualmente tratamos mas niños y adolescentes
quienes, debido a que han tenido experiencias traumáticas de violencia, maltrato
infantil, abandono o enfermedades físicas, n pueden usar adecuadamente su función
simbólica. La pregunta es que condiciones y que actitud analítica debemos y podemos
ofrecer en análisis para ayudar al niño o niña a obtener su capacidad para simbolizar,
independientemente de que tan pobremente desarrollada o bloqueada esté esta función.
En contraste con Jung y algunos Junguianos, el autor argumenta que aún cuando la
Función Trascendente es un ‘proceso natural’ y por lo tanto enraizado arquetipalmente
como decía Jung, la función trascendente no trabaja espontáneamente. Ella requiere de
una matriz basada en las relaciones tempranas del infante, las cuales pueden ser
reactivadas en el tratamiento. El concepto general de Jung sobre la ‘actitud simbólica’
puede ser complementado y focalizado en forma específica a través del uso del con-
cepto de ‘reverie’ de Bion el cual contribuye en forma fundamental en la formación de
símbolos dentro de la transferencia/contratransferencia. Esta idea se ilustra con el
material clínico de un niño de nueve años que sufriera una severa enfermedad intestinal
de origen congénito y cuya capacidad simbólica se hallaba bloqueada. Desde la
perspectiva del la técnica terapéutica, el autor nos muestra como trajo al tratamiento
en intercambio recíproco el dibujo de las narrativas de ‘historietas cómicas’ (comic
book). Los dibujos evolucionaron en tal forma que él los comprendió como una
manera modificada de la imaginación activa con niños. El proceso de dibujar ayudó
al niño a desarrollar gradualmente un espacio simbólico en la terapia y contener un
espacio psíquico en su mente.
Symbolic attitude and reverie 257

References
Alvarez, A. (1992). Live Company. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Autistic,
Borderline, Deprived and Abused Children. London: Routledge.
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: William Heinemann Medical
Books. Reprinted 1984: Karnac Books.
Britton, R. (1998). ‘Subjectivity, objectivity and triangular space’. In Belief and
Imagination. Explorations in Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Fordham, M. (1985). Explorations into the Self. The Library of Analytical Psychology,
Vol. 7. London: Academic Press.
Jacoby, M. (1999). Jungian psychotherapy and contemporary infant research: Basic
patterns of emotional exchange. London: Routledge.
Jung, C. G. (1912). Symbols of Transformation. CW 5.
—— (1916/1928). Relationship between the Ego and the unconsciousness. Two essays in
Analytical Psychology. CW 7.
—— (1916/1958): ‘The transcendent function’. CW 8.
—— (1917/1942). ‘The psychology of the unconsciousness’. In Two essays in Analytical
Psychology. CW 7.
—— (1937). ‘Definitions’. In Psychological Types. CW 6.
—— (1940). ‘The psychology of the child archetype’. In The Archetypes and the
Collective Unconsciousness. CW 9i.
—— (1946).‘The psychology of transference’. In The Practice of Psychotherapy. CW 16.
Kast, V. (1990). Die Dynamik der Symbole. Olten: Walter Verlag. (The Dynamics of
Symbols: Fundamentals of Jungian Psychotherapy. New York: Fromm International,
1992.)
Neumann, E. (1963). Das Kind. Struktur und Dynamik der werdenden Persönlichkeit.
Zürich: Rhein-Verlag. (The Child. Structures and Dynamics of the Nascent Person-
ality. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973.)
O’Shaughnessy, E. (1988): ‘Bion’s theory of thinking and new techniques in child
analysis’. In Melanie Klein Today. Developments in theory and practice. Vol. 2:
Mainly Practice, ed. Elizabeth Bott Spillius. London: Tavistock/Routledge.
Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge.
Segal, H. (1981). The Work of Melanie Klein. A Kleinian Approach to Clinical Practice.
London: Aronson.
—— (1991). Dream, Phantasy and Art. London: Routledge.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Elisabeth Adametz and Miranda Davies for their
thoughtful and helpful comments on this manuscript.