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The term ‘transformation’ may mislead unless the limitations of the implication of ‘form’ are recognized. In painting, in geometry, it is safe to think in terms of form, but I am concerned with a function of personality in the process of being represented and it may introduce errors to suppose that a function of personality has a form. In severely disturbed persons a transformation T (patient) may be a deformation. Such a patient, abandoning one transformation for another, may produce T2 (patient) β which has no obvious resemblance to T1 (patient) β. Suppose that T2 (patient) β is a shapeless lump, the term ‘deformation’ is not likely to mislead. But if T2 (patient) α is the patient's experience of being greeted by the analyst, and T2 (patient) β is the patient's representation of the event as a hostile attack made on him by the doctor, it may seriously obstruct understanding of what has taken place in the mind of the patient to suppose that either T2 or T2 β have, or are, forms.
The Grid in Elements of Psycho-Analysis [see p. vii] affords a method of escape from the implications of ‘form’ through resort to signs for abstract categories (the various grid compartments) to represent the content of T2 α and T2 β. A sign to represent the realization would denote, to take the example in Chapter 1, the landscape as a thing-in-itself, and therefore distinguish it from both T2 α and T2 β. The sign would denote something that is not a mental phenomenon and therefore, like Kant's thing-in-itself to make clear the status of T2 α and T2 β as signs for mental phenomena.
The use of these signs may be clarified by an illustration: The patient enters and, following a convention established in the analysis, shakes hands. This is an external fact, what I have called a ‘realization’. In so far as it is useful to regard it as a thing-in-itself
and unknowable (in Kant's sense) it is denoted by the sign O. The phenomenon, corresponding to the external fact, as it exists in the mind of t