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If there is an increasing consensus on the presence of a crisis in psychoanalytical thought (a crisis that is equally present in analytical psychology), caught as it is between the postmodern fragmentation of subjectivity and the findings of the neurosciences, there is as yet little agreement as to the solution. Psychoanalysts today are still torn between the need to create new conceptual meanings and original theories that spring from clinical practice, and the desire to remain faithful to Freud and simply modify and extend his concepts. The Work of Psychic Figurability by César and Sára Botella, child and adult analysts and training analysts at the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (excellently translated by Andrew Wells with the collaboration of Monique Zerbib), falls decidedly into the first category and introduces the English-speaking analytical world to their original contributions, developed over many years, to analytical theory and practice.
For the Botellas, ‘the truth is that it has become increasingly difficult to uphold a conception of psychic functioning limited to the Freudian topographies alone and to the dynamics of the repression of representations that stems from it’. From their work with extremely disturbed and traumatized children and with borderline adults, they see the negative as playing a fundamental part in the constitution of the human psyche and suggest that the theory of representation must be enlarged to accord a role to the experience of the absence of representation. For these authors the work of figurability (Darstellbarkeit), the passage from the unrepresentable to representation, represents a fundamental function of the psyche that is grounded in the inseparability of the negative, trauma and intelligibility. Figurability is defined as a ‘instinctual process’ which is neither representation, nor perception or hallucination, but a ‘fourth form of intelligibility implying and implicated in the three others’. In their theorization t