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I am happy to have the opportunity to respond to the interesting and thoughtful comments of Bouchard and Lecours on my paper “Transformations of Meaning in the Analytic Discourse: A Strategy for Research,” which appeared in the fall 1998 issue of this journal. This discussion also gives me the opportunity to focus on a crucial distinction between the multiple code theory and Freud's metapsychology that has not been fully recognized or “worked through,” even by colleagues such as Bouchard and Lecours, who are so sensitively tuned in to the issues with which I am concerned. I will only comment briefly here; I hope we can continue this interchange in greater depth at some future time. It is extremely valuable to have theoretical controversies in psychoanalysis—particularly those where an effort is made to formulate the concepts in operational terms, so that the alternative views may potentially be open to empirical research.
Bouchard and Lecours propose that the concept of “Referential Activity” (RA), which I have defined as activity of the connections between nonverbal, including emotional experience, and words, may be seen as a partial description of the process of mentalization of drives and affects as discussed by Luquet and Marty; also associated with Green's notions of “tertiary processes,” Bion's notion of alpha function, and other related concepts. The authors have formulated a bidimensional view of mentalization that includes, on one dimension, levels of containment (disruption and enactment, catharsis, externalization, appropriation, and abstraction) and on the other, distinct modes of representation (somatic body, motoric action, image, and word). They argue that the referential activity concept focuses on the dimension of modes of representation, leaving the dimension of modes of containment out of account.