Probably the greatest difficulty that an interested layman delving into psychoanalytic literature confronts is the dominant pattern involving analysis of symbols and symbol formation processes fashioned into a thickly and richly colored fabric of associations in the interpretation of the "normal" and pathological functions of the human mind.

It is in this near obsessional preoccupation of psychoanalytic theory with the processes of symbol formation and association in human psycho-affective and intellectual process that the layman stands the greatest risk of the pitfall of misunderstanding the psychoanalyst in his meaning and intent as far as the psychoanalytic theory is concerned.

Man is a symbol creating and utilizing animal. The favorite sociologists' description of man is usually applied exclusively to his development and use of language. The special insight of psychonanalytic theory is that symbol formation and its creative association extends deep beneath the level of the activities and functions of the conscious intellectual ego, into the depths of the unconscious.

The business of psychoanalytic theory is to explore the symbolic processes of the unconscious as it impacts on the Ego in the conscious processes of culture creation.

The special significance of the symbolic processes of the unconscious is that it is pre-lingual; that is, it precedes the emergence of the Ego and its conscious symbolic processes. Thus, much of the cultural activities at the level of conscious Ego function receives inputs from the unconscious though we are largely unaware of it.

The preoccupation of psychoanalysts is to uncover the behind-the-scene participation of the symbolic processes of the unconscious in culture creation.