What is symbolic thinking?What does this have to do with language, drawing or play?Check out this article!
What is symbolic thinking?How does that manifest itself? Symbolic thinking allows us to talk about what has happened in the past, as well as raise assumptions about what might happen in the future, that is, it allows us to leave the current situation to evoke another reality, past or future.
- Thus.
- This type of thinking allows us to go beyond what the senses capture in the present moment.
- Through memories.
- The elaboration of hypotheses.
- Etc.
- In this article we will learn more about the characteristics of this type of thinking and how it manifests itself.
Symbolic thinking could be defined as the ability to reflect on the current situation, that is, it is a type of thought that allows us to represent the reality of the environment in the mind, according to the experience lived.
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) provided many ideas about symbolic thinking when he began defining and explaining the different stages of cognitive development a child goes through. According to him, symbolic thinking “implies that the child is able to use signifiers to refer to meanings. “
Following Piaget’s pattern, symbolic thinking would be part of preoperative thinking, a broader concept that would go through three stages during its development: 1) symbolic thinking, 2) self-centeredness (the child is not able to disconnect from his point of view) and 3) pre-conceptual pre-conceptual pre-logical thinking.
As can be seen, Piaget’s symbolic thought is in the preoperative subperiod, which runs from two to six years.
According to Piaget, during the phase of formation and consolidation of symbolic thought, there are a number of manifestations in child development that make this process possible.
In other words, through all these manifestations, symbolic thinking would be dormant and gradually consolidated.
Everything you can imagine is real. ? -Pablo Picasso-
How is symbolic thinking expressed? We’ve seen some examples in the early stages of life, according to Piaget (two to six years), but now let’s look at them a little more in depth. Some (but not all) of the most important manifestations of this type of thinking are follow-up.
Language is one of the manifestations of symbolic thought; therefore, it is based on symbolization. What does that mean? That the verbal keys with which we describe reality are not those that indicate, but their translation in abstract terms.
In other words, we use language to represent reality through symbols, which in this case would be words. The same is true of symbolic thought; we represent something from the outside in the mind, but this process goes through a previous filter, which is the mind itself.
On the other hand, when we read, for example, symbolic thinking is activated, and that is what allows us to imagine the scenarios and characters we know through reading; again, it is a way of evoking external reality in the mind, through our imagination.
In addition, the whole universe embodied in novels or texts of any kind was previously created in someone’s mind, that’s what this kind of thinking is all about in this article.
As we have seen above, another manifestation is the symbolic game, which takes on special importance in the early stages of life, that is, in childhood, when the development of the child is expanding, so symbolic play is very important for development, especially for the child. early social relations and for the acquisition of the customs of society.
Through symbolic play, based largely on symbolic thinking, do children act out jobs, characters, uses of objects, roles? Through play and different toys or objects. Also, properties are attributed to inanimate objects (eg pretending that a banana is a telephone).
Symbolic play occurs because the child already has certain cognitive resources, such as abstraction, analogy (matching two objects because they have common characteristics) or symbolic thinking itself.
According to Piaget, symbolic play occurs around the age of two, when the child has a sense of permanent object (that is, he understands that the fact that an object leaves his field of vision does not mean that he has disappeared). the reality is that we never stop playing (in our whole life!) And playing almost always involves learning.
“The game is the highest form of research. -Albert Einstein-
In drawing children and adults graphically represent a reality (or multiple), in addition, this reality is often not presented to us when drawing, that is, we capture what we want to evoke by means of symbols (the drawing itself) thinking; this ability to use significant to refer to meanings.
So, somehow, drawing and painting allow us to represent something from the outside, but also the ideas we have in mind, that’s what symbolization is all about.
In terms of culture and society, we find in the drawings much of our memory and the memory of our ancestors (cave paintings, hieroglyphics?). In other words, in these facts we find much of the history that brought us here. .
In addition, it is known that colorful designs have allowed many companies to convey their hallmarks, record the distinctive characteristics they possessed and extend their heritage beyond physical survival, a clear example of this can be found on flags or in their drawings and illustrations.