Back to Table of Contents
nipple–mouth composite and otherness. These concepts are as crucial today, as they were to Freud (1895), to grasp how sensory impressions and perceptions are inscribed in the psyche as so called ‘mnemic traces’. Contemporary scholarship sees here the beginning of the path leading to primordial inscription. Further inquiry concerns how something somatic, sensorial, acquires a pictorial representation, and, ultimately, what steps are involved in acquiring the status of complex mental representation. VII. Bda. Elias and Elizabeth Rocha Barros Elias and Elizabeth Rocha Barros have been working on the issue of symbolism and Representation over the last 20 years, addressing the subject of representation in relation to symbolism from many angles and contexts, e.g., the function of evocation in the working through of the countertransference, projective identification, reverie; expressive function of the mind (2016, 2019, 2020), affect (2000), clinical implication (2011), field theory and interpretation (2013), the philosophical origins of representation (2021). Writing on the philosophical origins of the concept of representation , Elizabeth Rocha Barros (in: Levine and de Staal 2021) theorizes that it was the Pre-Socratics who suggested that representation is anchored in the need to identify an ARCHÉ – something radically abstract, expressive of the sensorially perceptible essence. In other texts, the couple Rocha Barros emphasizes that an image in itself is not a representation. What matters psychoanalytically is that figurability, especially through its expressive aspect, triggers drive reactions that are central to the constitution of subjectivity by relating to a meaning for affective life and by linking to other meanings and by opening new affective networks. Only then does an image or a word become either a thing representation or a word representation. They indicate that symbolism has an intensity and efficacy and is constituted by forms that evoke something and acquire meaning; it is the psychic tool that allows us to access the internal world that organizes reality in the human mind. It is at this point that symbolic forms become a Representation. They write that the structure, which they call form, has a content that not only represents something but also expresses something. This is the dual aspect of symbolic forms that will be constituing a representation. Sensory qualities in themselves, in their materiality (e.g., a cat), are not forms in the sense we are using the concept. They become forms when impregnated with a value, a valence, or a meaning, and thus become associated with an unconscious drive. Rocha Barros’ " affective pictogram " bears some similarities as well as differences relative to the same term proposed by Aulagnier. They suggest that the unconscious meanings graspable by the analyst and the patient take the form of the affective pictogram at the heart of reverie, and what is usually called an unconscious representation (Rocha Barros 2000). In this context, the term "affective pictogram" refers to a first form (partly conscious but mainly unconscious) of a mental representation of emotional experiences through
806
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online