The concept of representation in psychoanalysis: from metapsychology to psychosomatics

First, this paper sets out to synthetically expose some fundamental aspects of Freud's original concept of representation and its relationship with the origins of metapsychological reflection. Next, some central concepts of Pierre Marty's psychoanalytic psychosomatics are described, emphasizing the notion of mentalization and its relations to representational activity. The categorization of the field of neuroses allowed by Marty's theory is also approached. This paper, thus, underline the continuity between the theoretical foundations of psychoanalytic psychosomatics and Freud's metapsychological reflection. It is thus argued that the resistances to psychosomatics' theoretical and clinical innovations that can still be found in the more traditional psychoanalytic milieus result from the misunderstanding of its theoretical foundations and conceptual affiliation, since this criticism is often justified by psychosomatics' supposed removal from the metapsychological project.

metapsychology; psychoanalytic theory; psychosomatics; representation