ABSTRACT
J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis suggest that, in psychoanalytic thinking, broadly speaking, symbolism refers to any mode of figurative or indirect representation of an unconscious idea. However, there is a more restricted sense where it is suggested that there is a constancy of the relationship between the symbol and that which is symbolized. Once the “unintelligible” symptomatic symbol of the headless body was linked to the experience of separation, it seemed that the symbol began to acquire some meaning. Separation provided a context in which what the symbol represented could emerge. At the heart of D. W. Winnicott’s theory about the infant’s experience in the early months of life is the notion of illusion. He envisaged the newborn infant as being like an organism without a skin to separate and protect it from the physical environment. In the early months, Winnicott said that the mother must enable the baby to maintain a sense of what he called omnipotence.
