Discovering that psychological symptoms represent meaning in the subject's life, that they are not mere dysfunctions but convey unconscious intentions, psychoanalysis became a discipline concerned with the study of symbolic representation and not merely a clinical discipline concerned with mental health.

Representation includes the capacity for imagination, for speech and language, and indeed for the entire realm of cultural symbolization. For this reason, psychoanalysis can never be solely a behavioral science. Its scientific basis must always also be open to its cultural face, since culture is the world of representation in which we live. One realm where this has been most evident is that of poetics, understood most broadly as the act of making art (poiein, Gr.) from language. The capacity to make art is distinctly human and always addressed to the other. Any theory of representation that does not recognize and seek to account for this central capacity will be insufficient to