One of the hardest things to think clearly about in psychoanalysis,but one with which analysts are constantly confronted, particularly by their more disturbed patients, is the question of experience that will not go into words. Freud wrote about it in terms of ‘thing-presentations’ and ‘word-presentations’, emphasising the importance of the latter for adequate mental functioning.The concept of representation is central to analytic thinking.The capacity to symbolise depends on forming internal representations and it is when representations arouse intrapsychic conflict that repression or other defence mechanisms come into action.The analyst’s free-floating attention and avoidance, so far as possible, of preconscious assumptions are in order to detect traces of representations that the patient has needed to remove from consciousness. The analyst tries, by interpretation, to put these back into words.This habitual mode of analytic understanding, centred on the concept of representation, leaves out what is not representable: that aspect of experience which will not ‘go into words’ because it will not,so to speak,‘go into thought’in the first place.
