You might start with the classical Laplanche & Pontalis, then eventually move to the original Freud's writings they refer to. Then, you can eventually consider something more "modern", it depends how far you want to go...

Dear Lisa (if I may),

I think that the following one could be good for you:

Linnell, ZM (1990), 'What is Mental Representation? A Study of its Elements and How They Lead to Language', Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 38, 1: pp. 131-165.

Best wishes,

gld

Hey! I would suggest taking a look at the writings of Jim Hopkins (they are online), a wonderfully clear philosopher who studies psychoanalysis and representation.

Expanding readings and following the discussion, you could start considering Lacan, Ecrits; Kandel, AJP papers. About reflectivity you can consider Fonagy, Baron-Cohen, . If you want to get even more adventurous you can even consider states of mind without representations: presentations, embodiment...reflexivity...Stern and something mine on RG.

Manos, thank you. Elaborating around the main question could perhaps make this exchange even more interesting. I never wrote something really specific on Matte Blanco, though I learnt from and discussed with him as he was one of my trainers. Your enactivist approach looks very promising though I wonder how you include MB and fractals in it.

Dear Manos (and dear all),

it's not the place but I permit myself to say something on the issue of hemispheric asymmetries. I think that philosophers of mind have neglected this issue simply because it's not empirically supported and theoretically clear. I mean, brain activity does not seem to be so rigidly differentiated in two, as the distinction between left hemisphere and right hemisphere. I think that, in this sense, the work of people like Schore based on this distinction is quite ill-conceived. Further, much of this work (and, in my opinion, much of the work attempting to connect neuroscience to psychoanalysis) has many reductionistic caveats that many psychoanalysts tend to ignore, maybe because they conceive psychoanalysis as a natural science. I think that many of the constructs quoted by Manos (and also that of representation quoted by Lisa) can be fully appreciated as mentalistic concept irreducible to neuroscience and it's reductionistic outlook. In this sense, psychoanalysis should be interpreted as a human science, like history, sociology, etc. and not as a natural science. Personally, I don't think that this is something bad. What do you think about it?

Best wishes,

gld

Dear Manos,

I'm not quite sure about the empirical support for cerebral asymmetries. However, I'm very sure about their lack of theoretical clarity. However, I cannot understand their relevance for psychoanalysis (and also the relevance of neurobiological data in general too). Maybe (but I'm not quite sure also about it) psychoanalysis and neuroscience share the same object of inquiry (I don't think it is so, but I can concede to you), but they certainly do not have neither the same methods of inquiry nor the same kind of data. This is problematic because if, as you said,"the question is how we use these different perspectives in the same organizing framework", the problem is how to methodologically integrate such perspectives. In the past many times there were proposed general methodological frameworks of unification (I think to neopositivism, for example) but, for some reasons, such ambitious attempts have failed to succeed. Thus, my question is: why don't maintain the differences in the different perspectives and give up the attempt of unification? This does not mean to give up the dialogue among different approaches at all. It means only to not make confusions among so different concepts. For example, I find very controversial (and a bit ridicolous) Shore's attempt to deal with the concept of 'projective identification' as a neurobiological construct. Or, in this sense, I think that the neuropsychoanalytic endeavour is a dead end.

Best wishes,

gld

Coming back to the starting question, in classical psychoanalysis probably we should have mentioned Abraham, Klein, Bion and Winnicott (you know the papers). Now we are getting in a wider, wilder, knowledge space.

Manos and Giuseppe, kudos for this extremely interesting debate. About local and global dynamics in the brain I would mention WJ Freeman. Since his seminal paper of perception he has clarified about this dynamical, always reshuffling, balance.

It is like playing billiard in a lake: local and general processes always intermingle and the local ones are complex and, though self-similar, never exactly the same.

This is a mirror of our mind processes: presentations are always enacted in similar but different ways.

Sync waves and sync processes cascade in multidimensional scaling.

The mirror neuron function is just part of an Aleph of mirrors.

Thank you to everyone. I guess my question had a Butterfly effect on brain storms!

Thank you Lisa for your powerful and magic butterfly, producer of creative storms!

We might be just in the beginning of wilder explorations. Thank you Manos, is not easy at all to put things in place as we might be displaced from birth, prematured for reality and always trying to fill the gaps with linguistic illusions?

For example, we didn't mention how Freud's Wort-vorstellung and Ding-vorstellung are grounded in a deep philosophical heritage from the pre-Socratics to Kant. This is related to the basic problem: do we know reality or just shadows of it. In Freud, do we know a dream or just some pale and imperfect narration of it? Our imprecise connection to reality which we tend to surrogate with language is in the Fort-da game, in some primary absence we try to fill with words, while risking to kill "the thing" as in the traditional Scholastic motto. The enactivist approach could be a way to put things into place and fill the gap. At a fundamental level, enactivism is anti-dualist, while Freud was still a Cartesian dualist. We are so immersed in dualisms that achieving a non dualist perspective could be considered as an act of personal liberation. It can be shared, it can be part of true clinical experiences, in presentations, beyond representations. There are gems of it in classical and contemporary psychoanalysis, often buried under layers of words.

Do you think we examined this topic so extensively that we have sort of finished discussing? Any agreements, disagreements, doubts, new questions around?

Thank you Manos for expanding our reflections. Just by chance I have found a few days ago an image of the topology of a triple Moebius (attached to this message). It might be interesting if you would consider a trinitary approach as proposed by Charles S. Peirce, many semioticians and Lacan. Bion's Grid is a multifaceted approach to semiosis and reality. His transformation in O is something to consider

....I was trying to add the picture of the "Borromean Moebius" but it seems that the website is accepting only links. So, I will try to attach the link after writing this short note. Linguistics representations, imagination, are ways to find to link with reality and others if they are interwoven with the experience of what happens in the here and now. The specious (and spacious) present explored by William James, Merleau-Ponty and many others, before and after.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fdecomite/8215690357/

as you might see this is a Quaternary Moebius, adding a fourth, time, dimension to more traditional Trinitary topologies. There might be something lost and something found, in any case.

Hi All,

Franco Orsucci mentioned Charles S. Peirce and Lacan as examples for triadic approach to problems of symbolization. I would like to indicate that Peirce and Lacan differ in many points. One of these differences is exactly the question in which Manos Manakas is interested: Wheras Lacan understands language as disconnecting the subject from the world (the word murders the thing), Peirce's theory of sign develops sign character starting from iconicity, to indexes, to symbols continually. Within the Peircean approach we do not therefore have this split, that is characteristic for Laxcanianism.

Further, Peirce's approach excels in giving mankind the possibility to acknowledge traits of reality and at the same time, it does not fall back in naive empiricism or - having in mind that we are talking of human mind and thought production - reductionism. Because Peirce is always aware, that our knowledge of the world is through signs.

Hi Vera, I do agree with you that Lacan's triads maybe derived from Peirce's but he twisted so much the original ideas that the final result is really different.

In the end this discussion seems to have reached some point of satisfaction, though there are still lot of possible areas of discussion. I hope Lisa cold be satisfied by the results of her initial question. Maybe, one day or another, we could consider a more formal event or e-event to meet and discuss further about representations, enaction and their clinical implications.

Personally, I got a bit lost in this discussion and I feel that Lisa has not received so many bibliographical indications as she asked. But that's psychoanalysis today, I think...a big area for free associations and reveries!! :-)

Giuseppe, I am sorry if you feel lost but we started with quite simple responses and straight references to Lisa's question so, you might look there if you need simplicity. Psychoanalysis has never been simple, and it is in its nature to be open for interpretations. Furthermore, there are more references in this discussion and there is a reason for it. The problem of representation is a core problem in philosophy, not just psychoanalysis. If you don't want to feel lost just ask for directions.

Dear Franco, I ask you a deep response to a great problem: why do psychoanalists (as me!) lack of sense of humour and self-criticism? Maybe because of the Quaternary Moebius or of the so many interpretations at disposal? Please tell me the right directions or I risk to feel lost again!

Giuseppe, I was just re-opening Play and reality and Winnicott's ouverture is a masterpiece of courage, understated implications and irony: "to my patients who have paid to teach me". Perhaps that can be a new start.

Manos, not sure if the stream is dying up here and/or flowing elsewhere. Let's see how it goes.

In the meanwhile I have finally defined the trail to a new book...probably beyond representations.

Dear Franco,

I didn't know that Winnicott hai written books on psychoanalysis. I've just known

him as a painter.

You may be interested in reading the following book, it's not a new one but I found it very interesting when I first read it a long time ago!

Amongst the italian psychoanalysits, you can have a look at the following ones, which lighted up my understanding of the concept of 'representation' in psychoanalysis.

Io ho letto tanto tempo fa 'La rappresentazione: dall' oggetto referente alla rappresentazione simbolica' di Nicos Nicolaïdis, Bollati Boringhieri, 1988 - Psychology - 170 pages. Non è recente ma molto bello!

Oppure gli interessanti lavori del compianto Agostino Racalbuto come 'Tra il fare e il dire', Raffaello Cortina Ed. 1994.

E più recentemente fra gli psicoanalisti italiani i lavori di Lucio Russo, come l'ultimo 'Esperienze.Corpo, visione, parola nel lavoro psicoanalitico.Edizioni Borla, Roma, 2013. Io conosco il suo 'L'indifferenza dell'anima' Ed. Borla - 1998, e lo consiglio vivamente!

Potrei andare avanti ma mi fermo.

Spero siano riferimenti utili.

Buona ricerca e buone letture :-)

Gloriana

Calvin Hall - Primer of Freudian Psychology I believe this is te correct title to this easy to read paperback that is a good introduction.

I suggest you also: Beres, D., Joseph, E.D. (1970). The Concept of Mental Representation in Psychoanalysis. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 51:1-8.