What is Mental Representation? A Study of its Elements and How They Lead to Language

Abstract

Mental representation as a psychoanalytic concept has never found a central place in the family of psychoanalytic concepts and gradually has become a stepchild. A modest conceptual outline of infant mental development may help the mental representation concept become more central. The following ideas are hypothesized: (1) Registration is viewed separately from representation so that two distinct types of registration are initiated, one for distinctly mental phenomena, the other for unconscious, reflexive phenomena. (2) Perceptual-apperceptual focus is central, so that consciousness and interest in thinking always occur together whenever registrations are of the mental type. (3) A developmental schema process is proposed that will fill the humanistic object-self and motivational gap between Piaget's and Freud's ideas. (4) Analogy, metaphor, and syntax are seen to contribute to (in addition to being contributed to by) schema formation. (5) The mind is conceived as both an organization of information and as an organizer of information. This allows the separateness of representability from physical influences to be understood as both motivational and basically as process. With these hypotheses, mental representation may be viewed as central to mental organization.