On the Origin of Freud's Concept of Repräsentanz

One of the passages in Freud that best brings out the difference between the concepts of Repräsentanz and Vorstellung is that which combines the two in a single compound term, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (Freud, 1915, 250 in the German Gesammelte Werke; 148 in the English Standard Edition). Writing as I am in an Italian context, I should like to begin with some brief remarks on the Italian translation of this term. It can be rendered, perhaps not very neatly, by rappresentanza rappresentazionale [literally, representational representing entity], or more elegantly and above all more correctly, by rappresentanza della rappresentazione [literally, representing entity of the representation]. The two translations suggested in a note in the O.S.F., the collected edition of Freud's works in Italian, on the other hand, are misleading: rappresentanza rappresentativa [literally, representative representing entity] and rappresentanza data da una rappresentazione (literally, representing entity given by a representation). The first is misleading because the infelicitous adjective rappresentativa [representative], intended to capture the semantics of Vorstellung rather than that of Repräsentanz, proves in fact to be more akin to Repräsentanz than to Vorstellung, so that it ultimately confuses what it is supposed to distinguish. Hence rappresentazionale [representational] is better than rappresentativa [representative]. The second suggestion misleads for the opposite reason, because rappresentanza data da una rappresentazione [literally, representing entity given by a representation] distinguisheswhat ought, strictly speaking, to be left undecided. My view is that the natural ambiguity of the genitive implicit in Vorstellungsrepräsentanz - the only correct Italian rendering of which, I repeat, is rappresentanza della rappresentazione [literally, representing entity of the representation]1 - is arbitrarily resolved by the translator in favour of the rendering in which it is the repre