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February 10, 1970. THE CONCEPT OF MENTAL REPRESENTATION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS. David Beres, M.D. and Edward D. Joseph, M.D.
The authors define mental representation as an unconscious psychic organization whose nature, while not known, is capable of evocation in consciousness as symbol, image, fantasy, thought, or affect, which are the bases of all psychic derivatives and their modes of functioning in man. The significance of the concept of mental representation lies in its heuristic value.
Mental representation is based on memory traces of perceptual experiences. While memory is a function in all animal life, only man is capable of an evocation of memory in the absence of external stimulus. Perception involves external stimulation acting on sense organs which activates nerve impulses that are transmitted to the brain where a further synthesis results in a mental registration. In man, but not in lower animals, mental registration is the basis of a mental representation.
Freud defined instinct (id) as the mental representation of internal stimuli reaching the mind. It is the cathected and countercathected mental representations that are involved in intrapsychic conflict. Superego structuralization is the transposition of mental representations of the parental figures as regulating agents, to mental representation of the self as the regulating agent. Freud equated the binding of psychic energy necessary for delay with the secondary process. The authors suggest that it is the mental representations that bind the energy by countercathexis or by neutralization.
To acquire ethical beliefs requires the capacity to symbolize, to evoke the absent object, to anticipate the future, to conceptualize, and communicate by speech, all of which are explained by mental representations through identification with parental figures and internalization of their ethical standards.
Incorporation, the instinctual analogue of the taking in of stimuli, may be expressed in the fantasy of intro