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Figurability, the work of figurability and the attempt to conceptualise them, have constituted our main line of interest since our first article on them in 1983. Taking into account our reflections since then, we discussed them again recently (2001) in our Report to the Congress of French-Speaking Psychoanalysts, in somewhat similar terms to those we are employing here.
Freud's interest for dreams remained centred on their interpretation. This might explain, at least in part, why he accorded little space in his theory dreams, or more broadly of psychic functioning, to the notion of ‘figurability’ itself.
In the French edition of Chapter VI of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) ‘figurability’ (S. E.‘representability’) is defined as a specific method employed at the heart of the dream-work, on an equal footing with the three others: displacement, condensation and secondary revision. These last three were developed at length and were to reappear constantly in Freud's work, acquiring the nobility of basic concepts to the point of being considered as the primordial procedures of the unconscious system and, as a result, permanently present in psychic life; whereas ‘figurability’, on the rare occasions when it is mentioned, was the object of few commentaries and remained confined to the domain of dreams.
It is equally surprising to note that, even initially, Freud was not concerned to define the notion of ‘figurability’, as if the formulation employed in the title of section D of Chapter VI – in French, prise en considération de la figurabilité (S. E. ‘Considerations of representability’; G. Die Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit) were sufficient. He was not any more explicit in his work as a whole. Thus, in ‘Metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams’ (1917a [1915]: S. E. XIV, 228), the formulation is identical to that of 1900. And in spite of the fact that in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-17), ‘figurability’ is said to be ‘psychologically the most