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an open system, susceptible to modification through new sensory impressions. The word representation, by contrast, is a closed system, since (conventional) language fulfils the function of designating objects, events, or experiences and thus resists change. Based on this scheme, Freud argued that in first- and third-order aphasias, the associations between the elements within word or thing representation are lost. In second-order, or asymbolic, aphasias, the link between word representation and thing representation is broken, leading to the loss of language’s designating and symbolic function. Later, Freud reviewed his idea of Wortvostellung , word representation, as “closed system”. In the “Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) and in “Psychopathology of everyday life” (1901), he would point out that very often in the analysis of a dream, or in a lapsus linguae (slip of tongue) and in forgetting a name (example of Signorelli) one word is in place of another word by the effect of the repression. Therefore, through the “sound” (different accent, assonance), it is possible to trace the repressed meaning and to connect conscious representation with the unconscious one. The second path along which Freud develops the concept of representation consists of the link between representation and perception . According to Freud, at first, perception is the passive registration of an object from external reality, like the lens of a camera. Perception produces a temporary memory trace so that the perceived object becomes a memory image or representation of an absent object or events from external reality in their original, undistorted, form; these duplicate images/representations are all stored in memory. Writing on the development of thinking, he writes, using ‘ Vorstellung’ for presentation: “…all presentations originate from perceptions and are repetitions of them. Thus originally the mere existence of a presentation was a guarantee of the reality of what was presented. The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the first. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object,” (Freud 1925a, p. 237, original italics). Earlier, Freud introduced the term memory traces to describe the progressive transformation of the storage process. Over time, the initial duplications of perception undergo modification, so that the representation becomes a deformed transcription of the original sensory input—that is, a memory trace (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p. 486). This process allows memory to preserve the connection between past traces and present experience."In the Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895). Freud further develops his conception of the psychic apparatus by building a model for the biological basis of it; he proposes a tripartite division of brain neurons into φ, ψ, and ω neurons. The φ neurons correspond to the function of perception, because they would not be permanently modified by the passage of excitation:
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