Chapter 3 Non-Representation

The object of this chapter (which is a revised and corrected version of Botella, C. and S., 1983a) is to study the dynamic and economic value of ‘figurability’, the ‘sensory strength’ of the image – Freud's expression – and the analyst's use of it in the treatment. We shall present here the earliest stages of our research into figurability, at a time when we were treating children, some of whom were severely ill.

Our experience as child psychoanalysts confronted us with the phenomenon of autistic children sleeping with their eyes open. Their gaze, which traversed us during the day, continued during the night to fade into a remote background of nothingness. Once the first signs of an object-relation emerge in their treatment, these children begin to scream with terror in their sleep. Initially, as the initial investment of the perceptions and object-representations is still fragile and fluctuating, without there being any real distinction between what is perceived of the object and what is represented, the object's absence is in danger of being the equivalent of the loss of its representation. And, more than the loss of the object, it is the danger of the loss of its representation, the heir of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment, which is a synonym for distress.

Instead of a hypothetical genetic succession from the pleasure ego to the reality ego, we find it more heuristic to envisage their early simultaneity and a psychical functioning that already has contradictory interests. Contradictory, and not conflictual, which makes us refrain from speaking of a very early splitting of the ego, the notion of splitting being linked to that of a defence mechanism in the face of a conflict. Let us say that the ego has a double origin. Freud affirms in 1915 in Instincts and their Vicissitudes:

At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical. If later on an object turns out to be a source of pleasure, it is loved, but it is also incorporated