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Contrary to "symbolism" which represents an object by a symbol, symbolization does not in fact link the object to its representation, it links representations or psychic traces of the object to each other. And depending on the number and type of traces, there are levels of symbolization. The first appearance of the question of the recording and traces of subjective experience appears in Freud's famous letter of December 6, 1896. In this letter Freud proposes the idea that memory is present several times and in various types of memories. First of all, there is what he calls the "perception memory trace", which corresponds to the psychic recording of the traces of perception and their storage in memory. Then there is a trace that Freud named "conceptual" and that corresponds to the representations of things (or ‘thing representation’, in the form of a thing as in a dream) and that he inscribes in the unconscious. Finally, there is pre-conscious ‘word representation’. If there are three traces, there are necessarily two processes for passing from one to the other, two processes of transformation and, insofar as it is a matter of representation traces, two processes of production of these traces and therefore of symbolization. The question which then arises is that of the process of transformation which links the traces together. Initially Freud conceives of the transition from perceptual memory traces to representations of things as the simple product of a reduction in the amount of investment. At full investment charge, the investment of the mnemonic trace produces a "perceptive identity", i.e. a hallucinatory activation. When the charge is restricted, or when the process is confined to the internal psychic space, as by the envelope of the dream for example, on the other hand, the activation of the mnemonic trace produces only a simple representation: the representation of things. In this first conception, the first process is only a simple reduction of quantity, an effect of the mourning of the "identity of perception" in favour of a simple "identity of thought". The first process of symbolization is thus first conceived as "purely quantitative". This embarked part of the clinical thinking on the side of the question of quantity reduction, - the same excitement - and on the side of endurance and masochism when quantity reduction was thought of as a binding process. Before examining what produced an evolution in this first model, it is necessary to underline the existence of an alternative model in Freud which was present from the beginning. In the space of the dream, a space "framed" or even "enveloped" or "contained" as we now theorize, activation is hallucinatory, but the passage from the traces of subjective experience – "on which I had only glimpsed during the day" notes Freud in 1895 – to dream representation requires a "dream work" that is not of the order of quantitative reduction. The dream does not need it because it supposes a hallucinatory process, but of a work of transformation, of disguise, in other words of a work of figuration (taking into account the figurability, the requirements of the psychic presentation...): the "Darstellung", a work of symbolization.
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