A Metapsychology of the Unrepresented

Abstract

The terms unrepresented and unrepresented states are increasingly being referred to in psychoanalytic discourse, without our having established a generally agreed upon consensus about their definition, use or meaning. While these particular designations were never used by Freud, a careful reading of his work reveals them to be qualities that characterize the initial state of both the drive and perception. This paper attempts to place these terms in a clinically useful, metapsychological perspective by reviewing their conceptual origin in Freud and examining their elaboration and clinical relevance in the work of Bion, Winnicott, and Green. These concepts should prove especially useful for understanding and addressing problems presented by non-neurotic patients and psychic organizations and will help expand the reach and efficacy of psychoanalytic understanding and technique to increasing numbers of contemporary patients.

Keywords:

• Unrepresented states
• representation
• metapsychology
• unstructured unconscious
• fear of breakdown
• Freud
• Winnicott
• Bion
• Green

Notes

1 I use the convention of writing the word Experience, with a capital E, to indicate raw, not yet psychically processed existential Experience, something that cannot by definition be fully known. The word experience with a small e is used to indicate ‘experience’ in its colloquial sense: that portion or derivative of Experience that can come to be known or known about. An analogy in philosophy would be that Experience refers to the noumenon (Kant) or the thing-in-itself, while experience refers to the phenomenon (Kant) or the shadow on the wall of the cave (Plato).

2 In psychoanalysis, the term representation, refers to “the culmination of a process through which impulse and content and in favorable circumstances, disguised versions of that part of the content that is unconscious, must all be linked. It is a term with historical roots in Freud’s metapsychology, and its psychoanalytic usage refers back to that tradition and theoretical domain. It should not be confused with the way it or similar terms are used in other disciplines–-e.g., child development or neuroscience–-nor should references to its absence be misunderstood to necessarily imply the total absence of some kind of registration or inscription in ‘the being,’ i.e., the psyche or the soma, of the individual” (Levine, Reed & Scarfone, 2013, p. 4).

3 Readers may notice–-and perhaps will forgive–-my use of a spatial metaphor here to try to convey this thought. That I have to resort to something that I know is too concrete, potentially misleading, and literally false–-the mind is not a “place”–-is an example of the limitations of language that I am trying to speak about! For an extended discussion of this problem see Bergstein (2019).

4 See Levine 2022a for an extended discussion of this point.

5 Of course, any of these may have other aetiologies and reflect other forms of pathological organizations.

6 See also Ferenczi (1949c): “It is unjustifiable to demand in analysis that something should be recollected consciously which has never been conscious. Only repetition is possible with subsequent objectivation for the first time in the analysis.” (p. 261, original italics).

7 Additionally, it may take place in later development at moments of what will be qualified as massive psychic trauma.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Howard B. Levine

Howard B. Levine is a member of APSA, PINE, and the Contemporary Freudian Society and Pulsion; faculty at NYU Post-Doc’s Contemporary Freudian Track; on the Editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry; and editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series. He is in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts and is the author of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque 2019) and Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry (Routledge 2022).