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From a psychoanalytic perspective, the symbol refers to all indirect and figurative representations of unconscious desire (symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, parapraxes, etc.). This conception of the unconscious symbol depends on a relation of general substitution where one thing takes the place of another; but unlike the term's conventional meaning, defined by the conjunction between the symbol and what is symbolized, the unconscious symbol is defined by a disjunction between symbol and symbolized.

The approach to symbolization as a process presupposes the preservation of that which Freud, rather awkwardly, wished always to have prevail: namely, the necessity for a dualism, for the articulation of a viable distinction between the symbolism of the image and the symbolism of language. The truth of Freudian empiricism in the theory of primitive language, like the original proximity of the symbol, is no doubt to mark the importance of this fundamental proximity of the psyche with the body as the juncture between representation and affect, between meaning and primitive animism, characteristic of the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire.

[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]