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The Unconscious is now, in all respects, a component of the psychic apparatus. It no longer coincides exclusively with the repressed and sinks its roots ever more deeply into the soma, into the biology of the body. From there it issues its original dictates to the ego. The excitement arising from the soma becomes part of the psychic apparatus through its delegated representative, the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz , which Freud calls the psychic representation. The psychic representation, in order to function, is composed of two elements. First, the amount of affect ( Affektbetrag ), linked to the domain of feeling—both pleasure and unpleasure—which constitutes the level closest to the “represented soma.” Second, the ideational representative ( Vorstellungsrepräsentanz ), the scene or image present to the mind, consisting of an object, person, or fragment of the external world. This element allows the realization or discharge of affect and desire. Thus, the psychic representation condenses both the idea of the desired object and the quantity of drive energy associated with it . In An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938), at the end of his life, Freud summarizes these ideas by proposing a tripartite classification of psychic representation: the Sachvorstellung or Objektvorstellung , the thing representation; the Wortvorstellung , the word representation; and the Triebrepräsentant , the instinctual/drive representative, which translates somatic processes into feelings of pleasure or unpleasure. The Triebrepräsentant belongs to the domain of feeling, shaped by the link between soma and psyche; it is the soma’s delegate, representing free energy in the psyche, energy that tends toward either the satisfaction of pleasure or the discharge of unpleasure.
III. C. Multiple Facets of “Vorstellung” in Depth Latin American Perspective
Most psychoanalytic dictionaries agree that “Vorstellung” is an academic term of classical use in philosophy and psychology, and that Freud uses it to mean a mental image, that is, the image of an external object in the mind (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, 1971; Herrera, 2010). This usage corresponds to Hume’s notion of an “idea”. Among many connections between Freud and Hume, Johan Friedrich Herbart, the German philosopher and psychologist who introduced the English empiricist philosopher’s associationist psychology to Germany, and whose conceptions dominated German psychology during the formative years of the founder of psychoanalysis (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967,1971; Hemecker, 1991; Herrera, 2010). It was Herbart’s radical contention that consciousness is nothing more than the continuous stream of representations (Vorstellungen), representation being a movement passing through different areas of mind, from the conscious mind to the ‘subconscious’ and back (Kim 2024). This reading is consistent with the model of the mental apparatus that Freud presents in Chapter VII of “The Interpretation of Dreams”, where he distinguishes, like Hume, between a sensory system that receives perceptions or sensory impressions on the surface of the apparatus
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