could u people give me an article or a short paragraph on the need for symbols in general?

Symbolism is very important to modern culture because through it we are able to interpret history and only through history can we understand current events.Have you ever read "The Davinci Code? If not you should pick it up because it will help you understand the value of symbolism a bit better.

Here is an article I pulled up on Answers.com.........

sym·bol·ism (sĭm'bə-lĭz'əm)

n.

The practice of representing things by means of symbols or of attributing symbolic meanings or significance to objects, events, or relationships.

A system of symbols or representations.

A symbolic meaning or representation.

Revelation or suggestion of intangible conditions or truths by artistic invention.

Symbolism The movement, theory, or practice of the late 19th-century Symbolists.

Art Encyclopedia

Symbolism

European cultural movement that was at its peak in the last two decades of the 19th century, profoundly affecting the visual arts and inextricably bound up with music and literature.

Symbolism was first identified as a literary movement by Jean Moréas (1856-1910) in the Symbolist manifesto (‘Le Symbolisme', Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886). Symbolism in the visual arts was further defined by Albert Aurier as the ‘painting of ideas' (‘Les Symbolistes', Rev. Enc., 1 April 1892). Its complex aesthetic was a mix of Platonic-inspired philosophy, mystical and occult doctrines, psychology, linguistics, science, political theory and such aesthetic issues as the relationship between abstraction and representation. While many Symbolists reacted against the materialism of 19th-century science and its implications (positivist philosophy, social Darwinism, artistic Realism), others sought to reconcile modern science with spiritual traditions. Ideas based on the rise of scientific psychology with its emphasis on individual freedom and the great interest in the occult, together with such practices as hypnosis, opened up a realm of psychic experience, which promised access to important realms of knowledge. Symbolism stressed feeling and evocation over definition and fact and emphasized the power of suggestion. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in 1891, ‘To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem that comes from the delight of divining little by little; to suggest it, there is the dream' (J. Huret: ‘Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire', Le Figaro, 1891). It was felt that empirical science left no room for the spirit; however, psychological theory and occult doctrines explained perception and cognition as symbolic processes and indicated a spiritual path to understanding. These spiritual insights were obtained via intuition, fantasy, imagination and such subjective and irrational experiences as dreams, visions, hypnotism and alchemy. The realm of the irrational was approached through a variety of means, including drugs and such popular synthetic religious and spiritualist movements as theosophy and anthroposophy and the esoteric ideas of Eliphas Lévi (1810-75). Baudelaire's lines from his poem Correspondance (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) illustrate the belief in the connection between nature and the soul: ‘Nature is a temple of living pillars/where often words emerge, confused and dim;/and man goes through this forest, with/familiar eyes of symbols always watching him.' All these notions were rooted in Romanticism and were revived later in Surrealism.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia

Symbolism

In art, a loosely organized movement that flourished in the 1880s and '90s and was closely related to the Symbolist movement in literature. In reaction against both Realism and Impressionism, Symbolist painters stressed art's subjective, symbolic, and decorative functions and turned to the mystical and occult in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by visual means. Though aspects of Symbolism appear in the work of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and the Nabis, its leading exponents were Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Though associated primarily with France, it flourished all over Europe, had great international impact, and influenced 20th-century art and literature.

For more information on Symbolism, visit Britannica.com.

Architecture and Landscaping

symbolism

Artistic movement that flourished in the late C19 as a reaction to French Impressionism and Realism in painting. The poet Jean Moréas (1856–1910) published a manifesto in 1886 in which he stated the essential aim of art was to clothe ideas in sensual forms and to resolve the dichotomy between the real and the spiritual world. In painting this often gave expression to mysticism and occultism and the idea that line and colour could express ideas by suggestion and evolution rather than by depiction or description. Symbolist painting was often full of femme-fatale and death imagery, the erotic, the occult, the diseased, and the decadent. Among Symbolist painters may be mentioned Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), Gustave Moreau (1826–1980), and Franz von Stuck (1863–1928). In architecture it was associated with Art Nouveau and Expressionism. Perhaps its greatest architectural exponents were Rudolf Steiner and Henry van de Velde.

French Literature Companion

Symbolism

Defined narrowly, Symbolism was the term adopted by Jean Moréas in his manifesto article of 18 September 1886 to describe the rejection of the Naturalist, Parnassian, and Decadent movements by young writers (notably Moréas, Kahn, Morice, Ghil, Dujardin, Wyzewa, Retté) grouped around Mallarmé between 1885 and 1895. In broader terms it is used to refer to developments in French poetics between Baudelaire and Valéry which were then assimilated in different forms and to different degrees by the non-French literatures. Though too much effort has gone into the search for definitional purity (distinctions between precursors, true and peripheral Symbolists), it is around the poetical practice and critical ambition of Mallarmé that both narrow and broad definitions have crystallized.

In the course of the 1870s positivism [see Comte] secured its position as the dominant intellectual system of the newly founded Third Republic, and the Naturalist novel and Parnassian poetry expressed its scientific, didactic ambition to describe external reality. For writers who saw themselves as alienated or marginalized by the republican ideology of progress, democracy, and economic liberalism, the renewal of the idealist tradition taking place during the same period (notably via translations of Schopenhauer and Hartmann) reactivated in new forms the legacy of Romanticism's correspondences between the human and divine realms and the poet's responsibility for communication between the two. Though in the highly competitive Parisian avant-garde the polemic nature of literary manifestos encouraged simplification—Mallarmé never considered Zola to be exclusively a Naturalist; aspects of the Parnassian ideal, such as impersonality, universality, and the cult of form were central to the Symbolist aesthetic; themes and language associated with Decadence remained deeply embedded in many Symbolist texts—Symbolism enabled idealist trends to achieve definition. It contained a programme, the search for the Absolute, and since this could not be expressed directly, it proposed formal strategies of indirect apprehension of the mysteries hidden behind appearances. In this sense Mallarmé's aesthetic of suggestion—‘C'est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le symbole’—was flexible enough to embrace the group's diverse aspirations.

The catalyst was the founding in January 1885 by Dujardin and Wyzewa of La Revue wagnérienne (one of the many literary periodicals associated with Symbolism) and, in particular, Mallarmé's engagement there with Wagnerism later that year in his essay, ‘Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poëte français’, and his sonnet in hommage to the musician. Such is the density of these texts that within the Symbolist group they obscured the distance which he placed there between himself and the Wagner cult, a distance central to the distinction between narrow and broad definitions mentioned initially. For Mallarmé, poetry had no need for Wagnerian myths and it was self-sufficient in music. His sonnet enacted this self-sufficiency. Unlike other Symbolists, he did not believe in the existence of a transcendent truth which it was poetry's task to manifest. For him, words in poetry were constellations; their modes of operation were poetry's subject and object. Mallarmé's radical experimentation with the nature and function of poetic language was French Symbolism's most important legacy to modernism, for it crystallized the loss of credibility of literature as representation of an extra-literary reality.

Wagnerism had several faces and offered a powerful, wide-ranging resource during the Symbolist period. Some used it mechanically as a source of alternative allegories. Others, such as Ghil with his briefly influential ‘verbal instrumentism’, sought in it the basis of a new theory of poetic expression. More significant was its contribution, affirmed by Dujardin, to two major developments of the Symbolist period, the vers libre in poetry and the monologue intérieur in fiction. Wagner's theory of the contiguity of the arts, which many believed to be the same as Baudelairean correspondences, led Wyzewa to attempt a definition of Wagnerian painting which was too general to be effective, but in Aurier's hands the same theory encouraged powerful statements of the anti-naturalist trends in the painting of Gauguin and Van Gogh. In the theatre its emphasis on mysticism and ritual stimulated experimentation in all aspects of stage-craft and in the relationship between stage and public, as is seen in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axël, Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, and Claudel's Tête d'Or.

In 1891 the Symbolist movement achieved its greatest influence within the avant-garde, but even as it did so the defection of Moréas to found his ‘École Romane’ was an early sign of a classical revival in which Symbolism would be attacked as a foreign tradition. Poets like Verhaeren, Vielé-Griffin, and Kahn returned to nature and/or the modern world in one form or another, themes around which new groupings such as the Naturists and Unanimists reinforced the anti-Symbolist reaction. From the turn of the century it remained for others (notably Valéry, Claudel, and Royère) to transmit the Mallarmean legacy to the modernist tradition.

Psychoanalysis

Symbolism

The evolution of representational capacities and symbolic expression has contributed essentially to human thought, language, and culture. There are different symbolic processes, and the symbolism particularly described and interpreted in psychoanalysis differs, in many respects, from what is designated by the same term in other disciplines. While psychoanalysis is interested in language and other forms of symbolism, psychoanalytic or unconscious symbols were early recognized as universal and ubiquitous expressions of the dynamic unconscious mind. In ordinary linguistic usage, a flag may represent a country, and a cross may represent a Christian religious reference. In the case of the flag and the cross and other emblems or pictorial metaphors, the relationship between the signifier and its referent is both within conscious awareness and in accord with social and cultural convention. In contrast to psychoanalytic symbols, these symbols are consciously understood by the individuals within a society in which they are used. They are not disguised, and they serve conscious communication.

In contrast, psychoanalytic symbols are usually disguised by and from the individual who uses them and may not serve any conscious or intended internal or external communication. The meanings of psychoanalysis symbols are relatively independent of social, cultural, and historical settings and are neither taught nor learned. Psychoanalytic symbolism is not a product of education and evolves spontaneously in human development. Given the fact that these symbols are universal in individuals as well as cross-cultural, the capacity for such symbols is innate, though their development depends upon human development and experience.

Psychoanalytic symbols emerge as a result of the interaction of the instinctual drives, defenses, and other ego functions with the developmental experience of the infant and child. Although psychoanalytic symbols may take on additional meanings in later phases of development and may become linked to metaphor, they are essentially products of archaic, infantile processes. These symbols emerge in conjunction with the development of the body ego and object relations, so that there are symbols of both body parts and of the parents and siblings. Spontaneous in origin and typically sensorial, the symbols create a concrete bridge between the body and the primary object world. In a "symbolic equation" (Segal, 1978), the person cannot distinguish between the symbol and the thing symbolized. The symbolic equation denies separateness between self and object, whereas symbolic representation bridges prior loss.

Psychoanalytic symbols are typically linked to external, perceptual reality, manifest in the closesness of the symbol perceptually toward what is signified. Thus, sticks, swords, and wands resemble the phallus; tunnels, caves, houses, boxes have a perceptual similarity to the female genitalia. The body image and body surface are the locus of initial, symbolic representation of self and object, which are then extended or projected to other surfaces. Symbols thus arise in the potential to other surfaces. Symbols thus arise in the potential space between the "I" and the "non-I," more closely related to the primary process rather than to verbal language and rational thought.

As Freud (1900a) noted, psychoanalytic symbolism is ubiquitous in myths, legends, art, literature, slang, jokes, obscenities, etc. Psychoanalytic symbols unconsciously represent, in addition to aspects of the self and childhood objects, coitus, pregnancy, birth, rebirth, castration, and death. Symbolism is utilized in symptom-formation, for example, a paralyzed limb representing impotence or castration. The name Oedipus or "swollen foot," unconsciously represents erection and mutilation-castration.

Ernest Jones (1916) summarized that only what is repressed is symbolized and needs symbolic expression as a psychoanalytic or unconscious symbol. The symbol condenses unconscious wish and defense, a compromise formation permitting disguised "symbolic gratification." The most frequent symbols are probably those of the male and female genitals, and these symbols more commonly appear in regressive states such as daydreams and dreams. Psychoanalytic symbols, however, may be found in association with all developmental phases. There are symbols referring to the breast as well as to the mouth, tongue, and teeth; similarly, feces may represent money, gifts, and denigrated aspects of the self or object. Psychoanalytic symbols are often overdetermined as in the bisexual and biparental symbolism of animals, exemplified in the many meanings of rats for the "Rat Man" (Freud, 1909d). The rat was interpreted to mean penis, feces, money (rates), baby, as well as despised greed, rate, etc.

Psychoanalytic symbols may have multiple stratified meanings and, in contemporary analysis, there is appreciation of overdetermination and possible change of function. For example, the "pit and the pendulum" may symbolically represent the vagina and the penis but also castration and the threat of castration. In oral terms, the pit may represent the mouth, and the pendulum the tongue.

That symbols may acquire cultural and religious significance and take on other metaphorical meanings does not alter the original and primary meaning of the symbol (Blum, 1978). A cave may represent a grave without losing its earlier meaning of a womb or female genital, with the earth having acquired the meaning of mother.

Clinically, symbols are not pursued as an end in itself and are not the primary locus of psychoanalytic interpretation. There are no rigid formulas for symbolic decoding or interpretation, and patients may not directly associate to symbolic expressions. Symbols are interpreted in the context of the psychoanalytic process.

Comparable to an ancient language, symbolism may be adaptively appropriated in linguistic communication inside and outside psychoanalysis (Blum, 1995).

Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia

Symbolism

A term used by psychical researcher Ernesto Bozzano in relation to: "… cases in which, by subconscious or mediumistic methods, an idea is expressed by means of hallucinatory perceptions, or ideographic representations, or forms of language differing from the ideas to be transmitted, but capable of suggesting them indirectly or conventionally. In other words, there is metapsychical symbolism every time an idea is transmitted by means of representations which are not reproductions."

F. W. H. Myers included one instance of such symbolic communication in his book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903): A botanical student passing inattentively in front of the glass door of a restaurant thought he saw "Verbascum Thapsus" printed on it. The real word was "Bouillon," and that happens to be the trivial name in French for the plant Verbascum Thapsus. The actual optical perception was thus subliminally transformed.

Symbolism often occurs in occultism, particularly in prophetic dreams, which are sometimes represented in visual or etymological puns. Sigmund Freud drew attention to such symbolic imagery in his psychoanalytical theory of dreams. Many psychics find their visions of future events occur in symbolic form. Traditional astrological predictions used to be presented in symbolic pictures called hieroglyphs.

Literary Glossary

Symbolism

This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it denotes an early modernist literary movement initiated in France during the nineteenth century that reacted against the prevailing standards of realism. Writers in this movement aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond the material world of the five senses. Poetic expression of personal emotion figured strongly in the movement, typically by means of a private set of symbols uniquely identifiable with the individual poet. The principal aim of the Symbolists was to express in words the highly complex feelings that grew out of everyday contact with the world. In a broader sense, the term "symbolism" refers to the use of one object to represent another. Early members of the Symbolist movement included the French authors Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud; William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot were influenced as the movement moved to Ireland, England, and the United States. Examples of the concept of symbolism include a flag that stands for a nation or movement, or an empty cupboard used to suggest hopelessness, poverty, and despair.

Poetry Glossary

Symbolism

A late 19th century movement reacting against realism. Influenced by the connections between music and poetry, it sought to achieve the effects of images and metaphors to symbolize the basic idea or emotion of each poem.

Wikipedia

symbolism

"Symbolic" redirects here. For other uses, see Symbolism (disambiguation) and Symbolic (disambiguation).

Symbolism is the applied use of symbols: iconic representations that carry particular conventional meanings.

The term "symbolism" is often limited to use in contrast to "representationalism"; defining the general directions of a linear spectrum wherein all symbolic concepts can be viewed in relation, and where changes in context may imply systemic changes to individual and collective definitions of symbols. "Symbolism" may refer to a way of choosing representative symbols in line with abstract rather than literal properties, allowing for the broader interpretation of a carried meaning than more literal concept-representations allow. A religion can be described as a language of concepts related to human spirituality. Symbolism hence is an important aspect of most religions.

Language

All forms of language are innately symbolic, and any system of symbols can form a "language"; at the binary system. Human oral language is based in the use of written forms are typically deferential to the phoneme. The written word is therefore symbolically representative of both the symbolic phoneme and directly to the cognitive concept which it represents. The field of cognitive linguistics explores the cognitive process and relationships between different systems of phonetic symbols to indicate deeper processes of symbolic cognition. Many cultures have developed complex symbolic systems, often referred to as a symbolic system which assign certain attributes to specific things, such as types of animals, plants, humans, or weather. .

Psychology

The interpretation of abstract symbols has had an important role in religion and psychoanalysis. As envisioned by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, symbols are not the creations of mind, but rather are distinct capacities within the mind to hold a distinct piece of information. In the mind, the symbol can find free association with any number of other symbols, can be organized in any number of ways, and can hold the connected meanings between symbols as symbols in themselves. Jung and Freud diverged on the issue of common cognitive symbol systems and whether they could exist only within the individual mind or among other minds; whether any cognitive symbolism was defined by innate symbolism or by the influence of the environment around them.

Literature

In literature, "symbolism" may refer to the use of abstract concepts, as a way to obfuscate any literal interpretation, or to allow for the broader applicability of the prose to meanings beyond what may be literally described. Many writers—in fact, most or all authors of fiction—make the symbolic use of concepts and objects as rhetorical devices central to the meaning of their works. Brielle Gibson and James Joyce, for example, used symbolism extensively, to represent themes that applied to greater contexts in their contemporary politics and society.

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