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Following the complex evolution of psychoanalytic thought on the subject, starting with Freud, Latin American perspective refers to the concept denoted by German term “Vorstellung”. There is a recognition of two paradigms in the concept evolution: The first paradigm to approach the question has Darwinian biology as its pilot science. This "biologistic epistemology" is the one to which Freud subscribed until the end of his life. The second paradigm has as its pilot science linguistics, communication theories, and semiotics. The Kleinian school approaches the representation through the vertex of symbolization and produces peculiarities that enrich the concept. For the construction of a representation, the capacity to symbolize proves essential. Contemporary studies about representation have been developed by many authors, approaching the subject from different perspectives. Like other forms of representation, mental representation resembles the external object and can evoke it in its absence. In this context, mental representations serve as instruments of thought. Several contemporary publications on the subject outline a position that differentiates between the represented, the unrepresented, and the unrepresentable. The possibility of achieving a reconstruction of buried unrepresented traces and achieving subjectivation and symbolization requires technical elements that take place within the analytic field, as originally formulated by couple Baranger. These approaches present a specific development of the concept of inter-subjectivity. Other strands of thought propose an approach to representation from pictographic thought to the word based on Freud's initial thesis of the representation of the “thing”, which remains surprisingly up to date. These studies attempt to explore in greater detail the construction of mental representations. In this context, the concept of ‘affective pictogram’ refers to a first form of partially conscious but mainly unconscious mental representation from emotional experience though figurative and symbolic scenes. Overall, Latin American analysts highlight inter-subjectivity to unveil both the vicissitudes of the formation of relational connections and the capacity to represent. In North America , throughout the development of psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice, representation has been viewed as a crucial aspect of building and organizing psychic structure in individual development and in clinical psychoanalytic work. Continuing a fruitful dialogue with early psychoanalytic authors, contemporary diversity of perspectives includes various extensions, reformulations and specifications of the somato-sensory-motor and drive-affective components of the earliest (proto)representational phenomena, and gradual integrative processes from the partial to the more complete, from the
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