Rosen examines the relationship between Freud's topographical model of the psychic apparatus and his hypothesis about the nature of schizophrenic language. Four major areas of ambiguity in Freud's formulation are presented and discussed. According to the author's revision of Freud's schema, the psychotic does not suffer a 'decathexis of things'. As a result of regression, the psychotic suffers a decathexis of the language code as a shared entity. The schizophrenic loses his wish to share his experience with others and to share in theirs. When a schizophrenic uses a word divorced from its lexical meaning, it is the referential category rather than the 'thing presentation' that loses its connection with the words. To postulate an 'unconscious thing presentation' is to suggest that thought develops before language. Regression of the psychotic individual returns that part of his mental life which is concerned with the encoding and decoding process of socialized verbal communication to its primitive state before the word had referential significance and before 'things' had symbolic representations.