Chapter 9 Analysis of the Material and its Component Parts

It is difficult, in a work of this kind, to avoid repetition. The way it is divided up leads one to touch upon the same problem several times owing to the different angles from which it presents itself. If I had, at all costs, to characterize the essential paradigm of psychoanalysis, I would situate it, without hesitation, on the side of representation. When one speaks of the world of representation in psychoanalysis, one confines oneself in general to the canonical couple thingpresentation-word-presentation. There is no denying that such a couple is at the heart of the Freudian problematic of representation. Every connoisseur of Freud’s work will recall Appendix C of the Standard Edition for the paper on ‘The Unconscious’ in the Papers on Metapsychology, where Strachey traces the ideas put forward by Freud in 1915 back to his much earlier monograph on aphasia in 1891.1 This often happens when a powerful idea emerges in Freud’s work; not infrequently the roots of it can be traced back to a much earlier time, in this case 24 years before. Even though the intuition of 1891 emerged from reflecting on the physiology of the brain, it anticipated future approaches to the psyche. It culminated in the clear distinction between the system of word-presentations, comprised of elements of language formed of exclusive and limited unities (Project) forming a closed ensemble, and the system of thing-presentations, described as a multiple system made up of memory traces belonging to different senses and open. It should be noted that the word-presentation is not linked to the object-presentation by all its constituents, but only by its sound-image – visual associations being for the object what the sound-image is for the word. At any rate, Freud’s inventiveness in approaching this problem from the neurological angle would be pursued and enriched when he was led to distinguish the system preconscious-conscious in which word-presentations are associated with thing-prese