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The paper opens with the definition of endopsychic perception and with the consideration that Freud's notion of it has not won a place in the lexicon of psychoanalysis. It does not even appear as a separate entry in The Language of Psycho- Analysis by Laplanche and Pontalis who dedicate an entry to Silberer's “functional phenomenon,” a close relation of endopsychic perception. The paper attempts to do justice to the concept which, in the author's opinion, occupies a significant place in the psychoanalytic conception of the psychic: the questions touched upon are not merely historical, lexical, or academic; they are also theoretical and clinical and involve the practice of interpretation. Petrella gives a concise, clear summary of the history of this notion, which undergoes two distinct phases in Freud's works, one preceding and one following the writings of Herbert Silberer. He then gives a brief summary of the history of Silberer's functional phenomenon and of Freud's reactions to it. According to the author, it is likely that the positions assumed by Freud played a role in eliminating the functional phenomenon from psychoanalytic theory, and with it endopsychic perception, with which it had been identified.
The author's final considerations are of great interest. Freud intuited and used the notion of endopsychic perception to ascertain that the mind functions self- referentially, but he was unable to develop adequate paradigms for a phenomenon which appeared circular, flawed, and tautological. What was needed was the idea of a cognitive circle that was not vicious. Such an idea has been proposed only recently in a new model of circularity. In connection with endopsychic perception, it should be pointed out that dreams, like human discourse in general, have the quality of representing, along with the story, the stage on which they are played. This means that the analyst and the patient, in addition to constructing stories which they re-elaborate incessantly, become