IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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"they are permeable neurons, that is, they do not offer resistance and do not retain anything". Ψ neurons correspond to the function of memory, because they would remain permanently modified after the passage of the excitatory charge and build through their contact barriers facilitations of bonds and connections with other neurons ψ. The third category of neurons is ω neurons corresponding to the function of consciousness. These neurons are affected by the frequency variations of the energy, with an oscillation of the energetic charge (which Freud calls "period") which would give rise to the qualitative dimension of the psychic apparatus, that is to thoughts and representations . In the further development of the model, Freud hypothesizes that ψ-neurons are also excited by stimuli deriving from the interior of the subject. These may come from more remote regions of memory—memory traces—or from stimuli of the soma. Language and the technique of free association allow the excitation of ψ-neurons to be transmitted to ω-neurons, giving access to consciousness of the energetic charge in the form of representation or conscious image. Thus, the psychic apparatus and the thought processes emerge from a flow of stimuli that comes from the outside (perception) and from the inside of the subject, thanks to the hinge function performed by language, as well as thanks to development of conduction paths that connect isolated memory traces. In the Project (1895) Freud develops also another concept related to representation that is that one of the Nebenmensch and of Wunschvorstellungen. The Nebenmeensch , the helpful ‘nearby’ human being intervenes from the beginning of the psychic life and helps the baby to discharge the endogenous excess of excitement and to experience of satisfaction. Freud hypothesizes that if the experience of satisfaction has been sufficiently repeated, when the baby is again in a state of endogenous excess arousal, the drive finds ways of effective conduction that reproduce the memory traces related to the experience of satisfaction, allowing the baby to experience primary hallucinatory satisfaction: Freud defines this process Wunschvorstellungen , Representation of Wish. Freud follows a third path in developing the concept of representation: its function as institutional representation , understood as an instance that carries and represents other instances. This role, already present in nuce, from the very beginning, in the first elaboration of the concept, becomes fundamental in the transition between the First and the Second topographies (Topographical and Structural theories). In 1915 paper on “The Unconscious” The term Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, translating as “ideational representative” (Freud 1915c, p.177) indicates that the drive has its representative in the conscious representation, and that the unconscious definitively enters the psychic apparatus. Here, Freud returns to the distinction between thing representation and word representation. He clarifies that the Unconscious possesses its own representations, and conversely, that there are unconscious representations. "What we could call the conscious representation of the object now splits into the representation of the word and the representation of the thing ; the latter consists in the investment, not in the direct /duplicate original images of the thing, but in the more distant mnemonic traces that derive from those images” (Freud 1915c, p. 201). Therefore, the conscious representation includes the representation of the thing plus the representation of the word, while the unconscious representation i s the representation of the thing without the corresponding representation of word.

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