What is symbolic thinking?

What is symbolic thinking? Do you know what exactly it consists of? How does it manifest? Symbolic thinking allows us to talk about what happened in the past, as well as hypothesize what may happen in the future. That is to say, 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 are capturing in the present moment, through memories, the development of hypotheses, etc. In this article we will learn in more detail about the characteristics of this type of thinking and how it manifests itself.

What is symbolic thinking?

We could define symbolic thinking as the ability to think about the present situation; In other words, it is a type of thinking that allows represent the reality of the environment in the mind, according to lived experience.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) provided a lot of information about symbolic thinking when he dedicated himself to defining and explaining the different stages of cognitive development that a child goes through. According to him, symbolic thinking “implies that the child is able to use signifiers to refer to meanings“.

Jean Piaget

Piaget’s preoperative thinking

Following Piaget’s scheme, symbolic thinking would be part of preoperative thinkinga broader concept that would go through three stages during its development: 1) symbolic thinking, 2) egocentrism (the child is not able to distance himself from his own point of view) and 3) prelogical preconceptual thinking.

As we see, Piaget’s symbolic thinking is within the preoperative subperiod, which ranges from two to six years.

Manifestations of symbolic thinking

According to Piaget, during the stage of formation and consolidation of symbolic thinking, a series of manifestations occur in the child’s development that make this process possible. They are the following:

Delayed imitation.Symbolic game. Verbal evocation of non-present events.Drawings.Mental images.

That is, through all these manifestations, symbolic thought would become latent and little by little it would be consolidated.

How is symbolic thought expressed in human beings?

How is symbolic thought expressed? We have seen some examples in the early stages of life, according to Piaget (from two to six years old), but let’s now look at it a little more in depth. Some of the most important manifestations of this type of thinking (but not all) are the following.

The language

Language is one of the manifestations of symbolic thought; like this one, it is based on symbolization. What does this mean? That the verbal keys with which we describe reality are not what they indicate, but rather their translation into abstract terms.

That is to say, We use language to represent reality through symbols, which in this case would be words. The same happens with symbolic thinking; We are representing something from outside in the mind, but this process goes through a prior filter, which is that of the mind itself.

On the other hand, when we read, for example, symbolic thinking is activated, and it is what allows us to imagine the scenarios and characters that we are getting to know through our reading. Once again, it is a way of evoking outside reality in the mind, through our imagination.

Besides, The entire universe captured in novels or in texts of any kind has been previously created in someone’s mind. That is also what symbolic thinking is about.

The symbolic game

As we have seen previously, another manifestation of symbolic thinking is symbolic play. The latter acquires special relevance in the first stages of life, that is, childhood, when the child’s development is in full expansion. So, Symbolic play is very important for development, especially for early social relationships. and to acquire the customs of society.

Through symbolic play, based largely on symbolic thinking, children represent jobs, characters, uses of objects, roles… through the game itself and different toys or objects. Besides, properties are attributed to inanimate objects (for example, pretending that a banana is a telephone).

Symbolic play appears because the child already has certain cognitive resources; for example, abstraction, analogy (equating two objects for having shared characteristics) or symbolic thinking itself.

According to Piaget, symbolic play appears around the age of two., which is when the child has a notion of the permanent object (that is, he understands that the fact that an object leaves his field of vision does not mean that it disappears). Beyond these ages, the reality is that we never stop playing (all our lives!). And play almost always involves learning.

drawing and painting

In drawing, both children and adults graphically represent one reality (or multiple ones). Furthermore, this reality is often not in front of us at the time of drawing. That is, we capture what we want to evoke through symbols (the drawing itself), thanks to symbolic thinking, this ability to use signifiers to refer to meanings.

So, in a way, Both drawing and painting allow us to represent something from outside, but also the ideas that we have located in our minds. That’s what symbolization is about.

At the level of culture and society, in drawings we find a large part of our memory, and the memory of our ancestors (cave paintings, hieroglyphs…). That is to say, in these manifestations we find a large part of the history that has led us here.

Besides, It is known that color drawings allowed many societies to transmit their identity stamp., to record what distinctive characteristics they possessed and what legacy they could extend beyond physical survival. A clear example of this can be found in the flags or in their drawings and illustrations.

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