SCORPION

A symbol is anything that the mind holds as "standing for" or representing something else. The word "ball" is a symbol; and the child can point to its reference on the garden lawn. His unconscious however had, since the pre-lingual stages of his life, been creating symbols and manipulating the symbols creatively in molding his psycho-affective stance to reality.

When, for instance, the psychoanalyst speaks of "penis envy" in young girls, he is more interested in the unconscious disposition of this "complex" as shown in the rich associations she evinces in her everyday life but whose symbolic significance she may not acknowledge.

For instance, an African mother once noticed the pronounced dejection of her little daughter after having lost out to her little brother in a "lets see who can piss farther" competition. Later, the mother intervenes unsuccessfully in favor of the little brother in a quarrel over who keeps the little plastic baton the brother picked up in a corner of the garden. The little girl clings fiercely to her baton wondering aloud why only boys should have everything.

A psychoanalyst who interprets the girl's fierce possessiveness as the girl having substituted the baton for the penis she can't have does not mean to say that the girl consciously fights for the baton as substitute for the penis but that she had undergone an unconscious symbol formation process in which she compensates her dissapointment at not having a penis by her aggressive assertion of right to the baton(as symbol of the penis she cannot have).

In the same vein when psychoanalysts argue that women compensate for "penis envy" by elaboration of solicitous care for a male child, they refer to an unconscious process of psychological compensation by symbolic substitution. In this case the symbolic substitute is potent to the extent that the male child's subsequent success in life may compensate her sense of loss in the handicap of her femininity; in which case the first stage of symbol formation is that in which the penis becomes a symbolic embodiment of the male's social-political privilege(being what the male possesses which she cannot). In the second stage her male child substitutes for the penis which, by the time of her puberty, she might have given up all infantile fantasies of ever acquiring.

The psychoanalyst may see in her exaggerated lavishing of care and attention on her son an analogy in masturbation! Her behavior may be described as "autistic-autoerotic," because it is only apparently "altruistic" being ultimately in service to her own interest.

Thus, the antique magical ritual ceremony of women "mourning for the infant-deity Tammuz" is seen as symbolic disposition of female "penis envy," and the mythical motif of the "Madonna and Son" is taken as a symbolic representation of the concept of "woman with penis"(having acquired a "penis" by symbolic substitution of a male child).

Yet an entire society and culture which participates in the religious ceremony of "mourning" for the dying and resurrecting infant-child-deity might not consciously acknowledge the symbolic significance of the cultural rites(especially in its extension into the cross-cultural mystical-religious doctrine of anthropological dualism, that is, body-spirit dualism); and that is where the psychoanalyst comes in: he is an archeologist of the mind who digs below the surface of Ego function in culture creation to the unconscious symbolic processes informing our universal cultural proclivities

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