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REPRESENTATION Tri-Regional Entry Inter-Regional Editorial Board: Jose Renato Avzaradel (Latin America), Joseph Fernando (North America), Sandra Maestro (Europe) Inter-Regional Coordinating Chair: Eva D. Papiasvili
Consciousness is only a sense organ; all psychic content is only a representation; all psychic processes are unconscious … Sigmund Freud, 1898 (Letter to Fliess, in: Masson, 1985)
1. INTRODUCTION & INTRODUCTORY DEFINITION
The term “representation” has a common meaning related to the activity of designating events, objects, aspects of concrete or abstract reality by figures, signs and symbols. In multiple contexts, it can denote an action of standing for, or in place of, a person, group, or a thing. As a concept, it is widely used in the human sciences, philosophy and in the arts, in a polysemy of meanings and perspectives. While the concept of representation is utilized broadly in all human activities and fields of knowledge, including law, business transactions, legislative contexts, science, mathematics, and scientific methodology, in addition to mental sciences and philosophy, literature, and arts, psychoanalysis is unique in its focus on the unconscious, affective, and developmental aspects of representations. As a basic concept of psychoanalysis, and probably of all theories of mind, representation denotes a universal process and capacity of human mind whereby one element stands for another (or others). Because representation organizes human experience , all theories either explicitly or implicitly describe representations in their intrapsychic or behavioral manifestations. Traditionally , in psychoanalysis, representation can be visual as an ‘image’ (but also multisensorial) and it is often a composite structure, comprised of both reality experience and emotional experience in variable proportion, and its content often includes a layering of past or present experiences. It may be experienced consciously, preconsciously or unconsciously and is therefore organized varyingly by the primary, secondary or tertiary processes (Blum 1978, Arieti 1964).
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