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III. B. Origins in Neurology and Three Paths of Concept Development (European Perspective) In psychoanalysis, the term representation has been used in many ways and it is referred to as a memory image , an idea , or a content of the subjective experience , whether immediate and concrete or general and abstract, a concept . It is interesting to note that while in many languages there is only one word to define this concept, “representation” (English), “representation” in French, “representacion” in Spanish “, “rappresentazione” in Italian, in German there are two terms, Vorstellung (that is a more abstract concept of idea, presentation, imagination) and Repäsentanz (that deals with the idea of something that represents another thing). Some authors, mainly from French psychoanalytic tradition, hypothesize that these double words have influenced the development of Freud‘s thought. In parallel the concept of representation was connected since the very beginning with the study of the psychic apparatus and it has been changing in parallel with the evolution of Freud’s theories, in particular in the transition from the First to the Second Topography (Topographic and Structural theory in many North American conceptual networks). The notion of representation first appeared in the “Study of Aphasia” (1891), where it was linked to language and perception. It was later expanded through the exploration of language as a hinge between consciousness and the unconscious (1895). With the Second Topography/Structural theory (1923) and the subsequent investigation of the unconscious (1938), the concept reached its definitive status. Throughout this development, representation remained a mediator between psychic and biological life, a keystone of the psychic apparatus and of the relation between mind and body ( psyche et soma ). . Freud takes up the notion of representation (Vorstellung), a term well known in neurological literature of the time, distinguishing between word representation and thing representation ; but from the beginning he will also introduce the word “Repräsentation” in the sense of the function of representing ensured by the apparatus of language. Through the study of speech disorders , Freud sought to refute theories that linked specific anatomical regions to psychic functions, such as Meynert’s concept of projection. In this first essay, he relied on the concept of Repräsentation . To support his view, he hypothesized that when neural fibers enter the cerebral cortex, after being interrupted in the gray matter, they remain in contact with the body’s periphery but can no longer provide a topical image of it. Freud distinguished between word representation ( Wortvorstellung ) and thing representation ( Objektvorstellung ), bound together by a relation of mutual support. The word representation is an associative process in which four components of speech activity converge: the acoustic image, the visual image of a letter, the image of speech movements, and the image of writing movements. In this sense, a word is a complex representation composed of both sensory (acoustic and visual) and motor (speech and writing) elements. The thing representation is also an associative complex, formed by visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic components. Unlike the word representation, it is
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