The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis by Michel Henry translated by Douglas Brick. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1993,  xxviii + 353 pp., $39.50 Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner by Paul Johnston London and New York:  Routledge, 1993,  x + 253 pp., $59.95

The unsettling, far-reaching implications of these two valuable philosophical works for psychoanalysis could easily be missed or defensively set aside. Each in its own way offers a radical critique of representation, a central concept which silently pervades and

structures not only psychoanalysis but also psychology and philosophy.

In order to properly appreciate the importance of these two books, one needs to be clear about what “representation” means. The term can be used in two ways. First, it means an “inner” mental event or experience; it is the generic name for one's inner “objects” (e.g., sensa, impressions, ideas, emotions, perceptions, images, memories), those observed by the “mental eye,” present to the mind, to consciousness, to the perceiving subject. Second, “representation” can also refer to something external: to a linguistic, mathematical, or other notational system, to “symbolic, aesthetic, and religious productions” (Henry, p. 6). Representations in this second sense can, and often are employed to, represent representations in the first sense.

The concept of representation in both senses carries with it an entire network of related and interlocking fundamental presuppositions which form the conceptual grid for the sciences as well as for our everyday views about the world (about persons, language, external reality, truth, verification, etc.—see Guignon, 1983). This complex, ubiquitous network of ideas has been called “the metaphysics of representation” (Henry, p. 6), and psychoanalysis tacitly accepts most, if not all, of its features. For example, in his early work Freud assumed that internal representations exist, and arise from either internal or external excitations. In his 1895 Project, he represented these two different sources of excitation as phi and psi systems. Levenson implicitly refers to psychoanalysts' general acceptance of representational metaphysics when he says that “We would all agree that symbolization, in its divers manifestati