ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of pictogram, in hopes of extending and elaborating its theorization and applicability to certain clinical problems, the sources of which lay ‘upstream’ and therefore closer to the body and early sensory experience. It describes the understanding of the concept of pictogram in the contemporary psychoanalytic Field. Over time the use of the definition of the term pictogram has variously come to also include the phrases ‘affective pictograms’ or ‘emotional pictograms’. Piera Aulagnier’s pictogram offers early, upstream understanding of the trouble dreaming in Antonino Ferro’s Field. From Aulagnier’s perspective one can imagine Melissa as someone who experienced too much suffering or unpleasure during the primal and that her autistic defenses, and historical preference for being alone are present day footprints of her pictogram of rejection. Aulagnier’s pictogram of rejection can bolster analytic understanding of those patients whose difficulties originate in the earliest phase of development of psychic life.
