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The discovery of the separate destinies of affect and representation led Freud to advance the hypothesis of the unconscious and to elaborate his theory of the psychical or ideational representatives of instinct. This delegation of instinct to representatives is in Freud equally qualified by the contrast between word-presentation and thing-presentation. Dealing with these systems of representation, the author focuses on the theme of word- and thing-presentation in Freud's discussions of the topic, and then broadens the discussion to include the relation between language and primary and secondary process thinking. He concludes with some final remarks on representation, symbolization, and linguistic meaning.
The distinction between word- and thing-presentations dates from Freud's 1891 monograph, On Aphasia. Freud maintains a distinction there between signifier/signified and sign/thing, close to that of Saussure and structural linguistics. Freud thus maintained these two systems of representation: (1) a distinction interior to language, between word-presentation and thing-presentation, and (2) a difference external to language, between thing-presentation and the thing actually in the world. On Aphasia was an attempt to establish a psychology of representations independent of the nervous system, in opposition to his predecessors who had constructed associationist schemata founded on the research on cerebral localization. Freud's language apparatus in the aphasia monograph is the precursor of the psychic apparatus of the psychological works, and his two systems of representation, thing- and word-presentations, constitute an independent order of systems of relations founded on the body or the external world. Freud used this dual system of representations in his distinctions between verbal, asymbolic, and agnosic types of aphasia. The emphasis on presentation rather than sign indicates the importance the monograph placed on the psychological doubling of the word or