As Ferenczi said, the tendency to rediscover what is loved in all the things of the hostile outer world is the primitive source of symbolism.

Nonbodily cultural objects (sublimations) inherit the fantasies, and thus man in culture, homo sublimans, is man dreaming while awake. Fantasies, like everything else, exist only in the present, as hallucinations in the present, and must be attached to objects in the present. 

According to psychoanalytic theory, after their detachment from the body they are projected into reality, forming that opaque medium called culture, through which we apprehend and manipulate reality.

But the ego cannot get rid of the body: it can only negate it, and by negating it, dialectically affirm it.  Hence all symbolism, even in the highest flights of sublimation, remains body symbolism. Infantile sexuality negates the world and attempts to make a world out of its own body. 

Sublimation negates the body of childhood and seeks to construct the lost body of childhood in the external world.  Infantile sexuality is an autoplastic compensation for the loss of the Other; sublimation is an alloplastic compensation for the loss of the Self.