In this article, the author seeks to explain the issues surrounding the dialectic between representation and perception based on the introduction to J.-B. Dethieux's report on Freud's text ‘A Disturbance of memory on the Acropolis’. He then shows that this text contains striking passages that organize, in a kind of anticipatory announcement, the 1938 text on splitting: it contains the premises and formalization of the concept of ego splitting, with the various economic solutions (creation of the fetish) when faced with the perception and denial of castration.