ABSTRACT
In this chapter, that author believes that only through a constantly evolving symbolic process can a person's development assume that spiral form which, as Louis Zinkin has suggested, is the most appropriate image for the process of the synthesis of opposites—past and present, real and imaginary, personal and collective, phantasy and activity, and content and form. The symbol links the stranger with the familiar and so forms a bridge between what are, after all, separate and discrete objects and experiences. The developments in both the Freudian and Jungian schools have led to those theories and techniques which can bridge the concept of man as, on the one hand, an individual, determined and conditioned only by instinctual, emotional, and personal history or, on the other hand, as the product of inherited collective, social, and cultural forces. Thus personal experience can expand into collective experience, while collective experience can be helped to condense into potentially personal experience.
