Synopsis
Because psychoanalysis is a science of subjectivity, it is no surprise that symbolism has been of central interest from its inception and early development. There are few phenomena more obviously subjective than symbols. They conjure a particular fascination because of their enigmatic quality. For this reason, they manage to communicate something in an obscure manner. Thus, they partly hide. This duality and ambiguity approaches the fleeting and evanescent quality of subjectivity itself: at its most subjective. This book is assembled in such a way that the reader can trace the development of the understanding of symbols and their formation and use in its historical context and to try to look at their clinical significance. Thus, the book will be of relevance and use in the practical sense as well as the theoretical.

Description
The author approached this task by thinking about two issues. The first concerns what might force an individual subject to use symbols as means of communication. He is interested in the possibility that symbols are developed as part of the means of managing the inevitable and unavoidable anxiety of change. Change-or its prospect-is itself equally unavoidable because we cannot know the future. The author then looks at the development of symbols as a means of communication through the use of the setting. This concerns thinking about experience that is initially unrepresentable and to observe how that experience becomes represented in the psychoanalytic setting. The particular experience he chose was a sense of nothingness because it is by definition both subjective and unrepresentable.