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(instinctual/drive
representative),
psychische
Repräsentanz
(psychic
representative); 3. Conceptually related composite word terminology, containing the root ‘ Vorstellung ’ (idea, presentation): Sachvorstellung, Dingvorstellung (‘thing presentation’) and Wortvorstellung (‘word presentation’), translated into French, Spanish and Italian as ‘representation of the thing’ and ‘representation of the word’, where the focus falls on the distinction between two types of presentation - the visual type, derived from things, and the auditory type, derived from words. The representational processes here again denote a relationship, and passing between , different psychic systems, one dominated by the thing presentation and the other by the word presentation. In a letter to Fliess in 1898 (in: Masson, 1985) Freud noted not only that all psychic processes are unconscious, but also that all psychic content is only a representation . In the “Project for Psychoanalytic Psychology”, Freud (1895) described ‘thing presentation’ for visual and other concretely experienced symbolic representations of the unconscious. In this context, the unconscious was organized in thing presentations . In the “Interpretation of Dreams”, (Freud 1900), Chapter 6 of Dream Work contains part C: ‘The Means of Representation in Dreams’ (‘Darstellungsmittel’) and part D ‘Considerations of Representability’ (‘Darstellbarkeit’) contain exposition of the processes of transformation of thoughts, perceptions and memories, cut off from consciousness, into visual images, using primary process mechanisms of condensation and displacement. In this context, the dream may be a substitute for, and symbolic representation of, the infantile scene modified by intervening and recent experiences. In “The Unconscious”, Freud (1915c) used ‘word presentation’ for the mental storage of language in the conscious mind. He also described the entry into consciousness of the ‘thing presentation’ / unconscious idea via its registration as a ‘word presentation’, by connecting it with a word, which is one of the formulations of the interpretative process. In 1916, in “Introductory Lectures”, Freud addresses above mentioned ‘blurring of the boundaries between symbol and representation’, using the word ‘ Darstellung: “We must admit, too, that the concept of a symbol cannot at present be sharply delimited: it shades off into such notions as those of a replacement or representation, and even approaches that of an allusion…” (Freud 1916, p. 152). In 1923 and 1926, with an advent of the Structural theory (Second Topography) and second theory of anxiety, it is implied that the representational activity is a function of the unconscious ego, where the defensive and adaptive processes originate. In 1939, in “Moses and Monotheism”, Freud (1939) puts forth a hypothesis of a phylogenetic inheritance, through primal fantasies which can also be thought as symbolic representation of the origins, i.e., primal scene (origins of the subject), seduction (origins of emergence of sexuality), and castration (origins of the distinction between the sexes).
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