From the book:
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**I would suggest that symbol formation is also obstructed in abusive forms of therapy, where "unconscious motives" are assumed to exist and then hypostatized -- that is, they are rendered as unchanging and solid. This attitude, which prevails in patriarchal thinking, functions to prevent women from symbolizing their distress under its system. --JA
The schizophrenic, as I have shown, fears dedifferentiation because he equates it with death. He has failed to create a "womb" in his unconscious that could serve as a matrix for establishing unconscious linkages. [...] All he can do is copy the process of dedifferentiation on a conscious level which is impossible. He merely splinters his rigid imagery. Owing to their incompatibility the fragments become telescoped into 'bizarre" (Bion) mixture forms. Symbol formation* becomes impossible. What ought to have been conscious symbol and unconsciously symbolized object violently collide on the same conscious level. One of them must give way. [....] What the uncreative psychotic does is a horrible attempt at doing in the conscious world of hard unyielding objects what is only possible in the undifferentiated unconscious matrix of image making.
An undue emphasis on the role of depression in creativity at the expense of mania neglects the polarity of mania and depression. They are fundamental human attitudes, perhaps representative of Eros and Thanatos. Once we accept the equal status of the two polar positions, we can discern their cooperation rather than antagonism in the work of creative integration. Creative depression allows the ego nuclei which are split apart on a conscious level to be contained and held together, while creative mania swings down to an undifferentiated leve of awareness and resolves the sterilizing dissociation between the many levels of ego. Depression acheives ego's HORIZONTAL integration (occurring on the same level), while mania leads to VERTICAL integration by joining surface imagery to its unconscious matrix. Together they bring about the basic rhythm on which the ego's health depends. (Ehrenzweig 1967: 194-195).
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**I would suggest that symbol formation is also obstructed in abusive forms of therapy, where "unconscious motives" are assumed to exist and then hypostatized -- that is, they are rendered as unchanging and solid. This attitude, which prevails in patriarchal thinking, functions to prevent women from symbolizing their distress under its system. --JA
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