ABSTRACT
In the study of symbolism by social scientists there are two fairly clearly recognized domains. In one, the province of sociologist and anthropologist, symbols are taken as being characteristic of sets or groups of people, of institutions or of types of situation. So in anthropology we speak of the symbolism of the Nyakyusa or the Ndembu; the symbolism of sacrifice or of peyote or of witchcraft. Sometimes the word symbol is given such general currency that it is equated with 'custom' (Abner Cohen, 1969,222); it is the symbolism of collectivity - of myth, of ritual, of social structure - with which anthropologists are mainly occupied. As against this generalizing viewpoint there is the broad psychological domain in which the study is made not exclusively but basically of symbolic forms presented by individuals, often not shared with other people, and corresponding essentially to personal interests, claims, stresses. The symbolism of dream, hallucination, prophetic revelation or druginduced experience belongs in this domain; and so does much of the initial creativity of poetry and the visual arts. A great deal of this personal symbolism is private in the sense that it is intended to be, or construed to be exclusive to the individual concerned, offering his own particular solution to his problem of adaptation to some aspects of his immediate environment or to his conception of the world. To a person who is dissociated or schizophrenic, the shapes, colours, voices of his vision represent reality in a way which marks him off from ordinary people. This tends to pose special problems to those who wish to be in touch with him or help him. In a notable account of his own psychosis, John Perceval (in a narrative edited by Gregory Bateson, 1961, 271) pointed out how many of his delusions consisted in mistaking a figurative or poetic form of speech for a literal one: when his Voices' told him to wrestle with his keeper, or to
suffocate himself upon his pillow, he tried to do this physically, not realizing, as he later saw, that it was intellectual struggle and stifling of his feelings that were meant, by another part of his personality.
