BROWN: 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.

KOENIGSBERG: We love our bodies as we love ourselves. Because of repression, we give up our attachment to our first love object (our narcissistic body). 

We project our love object into the external world. "Nonbodily cultural objects" inherit bodily fantasies. We attach to cultural objects as symbols of our own body.

So human beings built Pyramids (the body of the Pharaoh), the church (the body of Christ), the Empire State Building (once the biggest phallus of them all). 

Scholars and artists create "bodies of work."

We passionately create and attach to these cultural objects--because they symbolize our own (immortal) body.

In baseball, we built a "Hall of Fame" to house immortal bodies (don't dare say that Babe Ruth no longer exists).

As Brown says, we are living within a dream. We dream that we are united with cultural bodies, substitutes for our own bodies (which are disintegrating, day-by-day).

BROWN: 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, 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 (in the infantile sexual organizations) 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.