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In a recent work, Marcel Detienne (2005) critically refers to the division that historians made in the past between cultures with writing and those without. Historians used to be concerned with the former, leaving to anthropologists the study of the latter, as though only written documentation permitted the deconstruction of a history worthy of that name. Today's prehistorical art scholars, by contrast, decode grammatical forms at the foundations of rocky landscapes, distinguishing between pictograms (anthropomorphic figures or real objects), ideograms (referring to conventional concepts), and psychograms (signs that express feelings and emotions) (Anati, 2008). These date back to forms of life led by populations that disappeared millennia ago, civilizations that left legible messages even though writing was not available. Indeed, the appearance of this more sophisticated form of communication impoverished figurative art, which became more schematic and less carefully done (Anati, 2008). And today it is unsettling to «participate» in a ritual dance, to «witness» a hunting expedition, or to «guide» a herd out to pasture, observing first-hand the endless richness of the desert paintings of Akakus, also dating back 10,000 to 12,000 years.
For psychoanalysts, the question has emerged as a debate over the use of verbal language as a distinguishing feature for research into the analysand's past. And it was the clamor heard in the consulting room that demanded that we address this prehistorical past which had so struck Freud1 at the end of his life, but that he had found difficult to investigate. Some traumatic situations spur us on to consider those early periods of development in which the subject is more sensitive to environmental influences, in order to be able to reach him. With respect to Freud, we are encouraged by the theoretical and technical advances that provide us with some additional instruments with which to examine the functioning of the analysand, the analys