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mental elements to form narrative bits and associative chains, etc. It is then that they acquire status as representations and can be used to form thoughts and ideas that can be brought to consciousness or repressed into the unconscious because of the anxiety that they arouse. It is worth noting that this distinction is not always clear-cut, and that there exists a continuum in the representability of emotional experience. Additionally, according to North American Perspective , while before 1965, Bion uses the term transformation in a rather colloquial sense, in the highly abstract paper “Transformation” (Bion 1965), a transformation is a change in form with the essential elements, aspects, qualities (invariants, e.g. ‘poppiness’ of Van Gogh’s “Field with Poppies”) staying the same. For Bion, as a psychoanalyst, transformation here is a change in forms in the mind, from realization to representation : just as painter transforms the landscape (the realization) into a painting (representation), the work of psychoanalyst transforms the facts of psychoanalytic experience (the realization) into an interpretation (the representation). (See also separate entries CONTAINMENT:CONTAINER/CONTAINED and TRANSFORMATION)
V. B. Alignment of Ego Psychology with Object Relations: Joseph Sandler and Bernard Rosenblatt
A prominent member of Anna Freud’s Ego psychology circle within the British Psychoanalytical Society, Jospeh Sandler forged links between classical drive theory and British Object Relations theories. Specifically, as it regards representation, Sandler and Rosenblatt (1962) introduced an influential concept of the ‘ Representational World ’ to explain the internal organization of self and object representations and their corresponding affects and fantasies. Defining the notion of the representational world as “more or less enduring existence as an organization or schema which is constructed out of a multitude of impressions” (Sandler and Rosenblatt 1962, p. 133), they suggested that representations of self and other have a shape; they also have an affective component that enables the structuring of sensations and perceptions arising from interpersonal experiences. Sandler and Rosenblatt (1962), and Joffe and Sandler (1965) suggested that cognitive development, affective development, and the development of the structures representing internalized object relations are intimately linked. Focusing on the studies of development of self-structures, they arrive at a position similar to that of Edith Jacobson in North America (1964), namely that identification, necessarily involving a modification of self-representation under the influence of object-representation depends on the extent to which a particular self- representation fits into the individual’s overall defensive configuration.
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