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Arild Utaker´s article, Images and words: a reconsideration of the psychic dimension (2015), analyzes important concepts that are essential to discuss: the concept of meaning and the production of meaning within a psychoanalytic framework. One of Utaker´s important arguments is that images and words are to be understood as specific sensuous dimensions. They are not reducible either to something in reality, which is represented in the psyche, or to something definable only as forms or contours. Thus, meaning exists on its own and is not reducible to anything else. In the following I want to describe another way of defining meaning production, one that in some ways is parallel to Utaker´s definition in that it starts with the concept of sense or meaning in consciousness. In this description, I believe, there are some aspects that may enhance the discussion Utaker initiates.
I think there are some fundamental aspects in the psychoanalytic model of the psychic apparatus that have to be re-thought:
It is very rare in psychoanalysis to discuss not only the ordinary sense modalities (the visual, the auditory, etc.) but also movement, language, and affects. Yet, the latter three also produce meaning, hence they are modalities as well. If psychoanalytic theory is going to incorporate meaning and meaning production as fundamental concepts, then it becomes necessary to have a more detailed theory of the constitution of the psychic modalities and, in particular, of the combination of them – because, to a great extent, meaning consists of elements from these modalities in combinations with one another.
Freud´s model is based on the combination of the reflex model and associationism – a combination that was extremely dominant in the late 1880s (Køppe, 2004). The reflex model goes back to Descartes but was greatly expanded from the late 1700s to the end of the 1800s. Associationism is even older dating back to Aristoteles. Its main idea is that our sense receptors generate sense st