“A mind to which the stern character of an armchair is more
immediately apparent than its use or its position in the room, is
over-sensitive to expressive forms. It grasps analogies that a riper experience
would reject as absurd. It fuses sensa that practical thinking must keep apart.
Yet it is just this crazy play of associations, this uncritical fusion of
impressions, that exercises the powers of symbolic transformation. To project
feelings into outer objects is the first way of symbolizing, and thus of conceiving
those feelings. This activity belongs to about the earliest period of childhood
that memory can recover. The conception of ‘self,’ which is usually thought to
mark the beginning of actual memory, may possibly depend on this process of
symbolically epitomizing our feelings.”
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
