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III. Bb. Other French Conceptualizations: Primary and Secondary Symbolization The 'diurnal' model of a process based on the taming of the impulse was to be maintained as a major mechanism until 1915, when Freud, in the his Metapsychological papers (1915 a,b,c) was still grappling with what he called 'double inscription', wondering whether inscriptions remain in the system from which they originate and are linked together, or whether they move from one system to another. However, a dialectical ferment and a clinical difficulty of Freud’s work, which would put metapsychology in crisis, lead him to introduce a complementary model of “Mourning and Melancholia”. The impasse of melancholy indeed confronts a form of paradoxical circularity: in order to mourn the object, it is necessary to be able to symbolize it and to preserve an internal representation of it, but in order to be able to symbolize it, it is necessary to have mourned it (i.e., in fact, the mourning of finding it again in "identity of perception" in order to be satisfied with "identity of thought"). Representation may in fact be considered a representation of an accepted absent object, an object that one does not seek at all costs to make present according to the model of the "identity of perception" – the hallucinatory; it is "symbolization of the absent object" from its internal trace. From then on, the question arises as to the conditions required for the subject to accept the absence of the object and agree to engage in the palliative consolation by the object’s internal representation. This is where the paradox appears. In order to accept that the object is absent, simply absent, without its absence from perception producing an uprooting of being, the subject must have an internal representation of the object, so that the object remains internally present (and the psyche only has to 'peel off' the internal representation of the perception of the object). In order to get out of the paradox, it is necessary to hypothesize that the process of symbolization that makes the absence of the object tolerable is not the same as that which is made possible by the absence of the object. One must hypothesize that there is also a mode of symbolization that occurs 'in the presence of the object', in the encounter with it, and not just in its absence, a mode of symbolization that symbolizes the mode of presence of the object and the mode of encounter that takes place in this presence. There are modes of language based on presence, on encounter, which presuppose presence in order to be established, and which are at the origin of modes of symbolization based on presence, such as the non-verbal modes of language of the early period. The model of the dream, that of a nocturnal primary symbolization work, must therefore be completed by the model of a diurnal primary symbolization form and in the presence of the object. Symbolization can no longer simply be considered as symbolization of absence, which presupposes a previous form of representation based on presence and mode of encounter. This is why the hypothesis of a "primary" symbolization has gradually been developed in France. The term was introduced by Andre Green (1970), later used by Didier Anzieu
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