ABSTRACT

By “symbolic function” most infant researchers mean the ability of the infant to imagine other persons or objects in their absence. With this capacity, thinking loosens its grip from being limited only to concrete perception and opens the way for free fantasy, which is independent of literal reality and can even stand in opposition to it. The infant now has the possibility to imagine, and wish for, another reality than the current one. Before this maturational phase is reached, perception is biased towards the actual current circumstance, for example., affective and cognitive needs; but with no ability to imagine that what is given could also be different from what it is (see Dornes, 1993, p. 193). Transforming its perceptions of concrete reality into a world of fantasy or imagination is not yet possible for the infant. This specifically human ability of fantasizing, on which our creativity rests, and ultimately our entire culture and civilization, first appears at the age of about 18 months in the maturational unfolding of the infant. Before this age there is “clearly for the infant, in its experience, the feature of inevitability: It cannot possibly be different than it is” (Ogden, 1984, p. 187). Thus wishful thinking is impossible for the “presymbolic” infant, since to wish is an intrapsychic construction, which is itself “constituted by means of the symbolic function.” Here the observation of the infant researchers stands in contrast to classical Freudian psychoanalysis.