52 Tahir Wood
Could it not be the case that in the process of hominisation certain (archetypal) symbols
of a universal significance have been retained by the species, analogous to the instinctive
indices of the animal? Such a notion, which is commonly although not necessarily associated
with the name of Jung, is not inherently implausible or ̳mystical‘. Mills (2000), for example,
in describing how the ego emerges from the unconscious, argues that it cannot do so ex nihilo
and that what is at stake is really a separation within the unconscious itself, which culminates
in a division between an innate preconception on the one hand and a realisation that takes
place in experience on the other. Citing passages such as the following, he draws attention to
a notion of the unconscious found in Hegel‘s anthropological work, an ̳underworld of spirit‘
or ̳nocturnal abyss‘, that predates the discoveries of psychoanalysis:
To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely
many images and representations, yet without being in consciousness, is from the one point of
view the universal postulate which bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat, for
example, the germ as affirmatively containing, in virtual possibility, all the qualities that come
into existence in the subsequent development of the tree. (Hegel Philosophy of Mind, § 453)If we were to accept a set of archetypal indices, we would be postulating an archaic
semiotic realm that is specific to the human species, deriving no doubt from its earliest semi-
animal stage of development, but which is overlaid by a later semiotic layer, as it were,
another indexical realm that is not instinctual in nature, but rather motivated by experience.
Once this is admitted, however, we notice that both of these possibilities are in fact already in
place in the animal kingdom, albeit to a limited extent and in a different balance for each
species. A great many species have some ability to acquire knowledge of indexical
relationships on the basis of experience in addition to those indices that are clearly instinctual,
albeit without the emergence of an ego capable of conscious reflection on such experience.^14
By retaining these two notions in tension with each other, relating as they do to the
universal and the particular, we may gain a better notion of the animal in man and a better
idea of how it is that subjectivity emerges from this through semiosis.
And, just as Abraham (1987) shows how ̳phantoms‘ are created and passed on in family
history, as much through the unsaid as through the said, we must surely imagine that through
the operation of taboos this happens within broader cultures as well, in civil society. So, in
human cognition, we may find here again a triadic rather than dyadic division in the
derivation of these ̳symbols‘ – really indices within the symbolic order, since they are all
motivated by concrete associations – between those of the species, the culture and the
individual. None of this is meant to detract from the importance accorded by Rand and Torok
to ―the willingness of psychoanalysis to welcome people into their own personal creations‖
(1993, p. 577), and one may add, the value of helping them to verbalise these personal
creations in the work of enriching subjectivity through introjection.
In our aspiration to rise above the indexical within the symbolic order this cannot entail a
leaving behind of the indexical but rather consists in making the indexical, whether the sum
total of mental associations or any part thereof, our own object of reflective thought. And this
might include the heritage derived from both our species being and our culture. After all
̳personal creation‘ is not necessarily the work of the individual all-alone.
(^14) ―By the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas had concluded that animals make use of signs, both natural and those
founded on second nature, or custom‖ (Sebeok, 1999, p. 93).