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Vorstellungsrepräsentanz

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Think of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as the psyche's "placeholder" for something it cannot think directly: when a disturbing wish is pushed into the unconscious by repression, what gets buried is not a feeling but a kind of mental bookmark — a signifier that holds the place of the thing that can't be faced — while the attached emotion floats away and may turn up somewhere else as anxiety.

Definition

Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (literally "representative of the representation," or in Lacan's preferred French rendering, représentant de la représentation) is Freud's technical term from the 1915 metapsychological papers — especially "Repression" and "The Unconscious" — for the psychical delegate or stand-in through which the drive (Trieb) gains access to the mind. Freud's key move is to split the drive's psychical registration into two heterogeneous components: the ideational representative (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) and its quota of affect (Affektbetrag). Repression operates exclusively on the former: the ideational representative is expelled from (or never allowed into) consciousness and sinks into the unconscious, while the attached affect is set adrift — displaced, transformed, or turned into anxiety — but never itself repressed. The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz thus names what the unconscious actually preserves: not feelings, not instinctual energies, but signifier-like representational units that enter into the combinatory of the psychical apparatus and are, in Freud's phrase, "indestructible."

Lacan seizes on this Freudian term as the metapsychological anchor for his thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language. He translates it with deliberate care as "representative of the representation" rather than the competing "ideational representative" or "representative representative" (représentant représentatif), because the correct rendering carries the entire theoretical weight: what is repressed is not a signified content or a felt quality but a representative — a pure signifying function that stands in for something that cannot itself appear. In Seminar XI, Lacan states simply: "The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier" — identifying it with the second signifier of the primal dyad (S1→S2) whose advent constitutes primal repression (Urverdrängung) and whose submission to the bar inaugurates the divided subject. The Repräsentanz component designates pure representative-function stripped of signification (analogous to a diplomatic representative who must not let his own personality intervene), while the Vorstellung component carries the representational-semantic dimension. Their compound articulates how the drive leaves a structural trace — a placeholder — in the symbolic order, marking the place of what cannot be represented: the Real, das Ding, the missing sexual signifier.

Evolution

In Freud's own usage — primarily in "Repression" (1915) and "The Unconscious" (1915) — the term performs a precise metapsychological task: it names the ideational side of the drive-representative that undergoes repression, as distinguished from the affective quota which undergoes only transformations (displacement, reversal, conversion to anxiety). This Freudian split between the representational delegate and affect is the founding gesture on which all subsequent Lacanian uses depend. The Freudian texts themselves, however, are not entirely consistent: Freud occasionally speaks of "unconscious affects," particularly from 1907 onward regarding unconscious guilt, a vacillation that creates the interpretive controversy documented extensively in Johnston (self-and-emotional-life-adrian-johnston).

Lacan's engagement with the term intensifies across his middle period. In Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60), he uses it to name the signifying network (Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen) that organizes the psychic apparatus around das Ding as its excluded center — distinguishing the representational network that circles the Thing from the Thing itself (jacques-lacan-seminar-7, p. 127). By Seminar IX (Identification, 1961–62), he begins foregrounding the translation controversy, insisting on "representative of the representation" against rivals who prefer "representative representative" or "ideational representative." He specifies that Repräsentanz names the pure signifier-function at the "real level of communication" — like a diplomat who represents France without expressing personal opinions — while Vorstellung names the representational-semantic register (jacques-lacan-seminar-11, p. 235). The decisive formulation arrives in Seminar XI (1963–64): "The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier" — equating it with the second signifier of the primal dyad and locating it as the central point of Urverdrängung, the attractor around which all subsequent repressions organize (jacques-lacan-seminar-11, p. 233). The alternative translation in Seminar XI (p. 75) — "that which takes the place of the representation" (le tenant-lieu de la représentation) — points it toward the Real: behind the placeholder is not another representation but the Trieb itself, the encounter forever missed.

Later seminars extend the term's range. In Seminar XII (1964–65), Lacan aligns it with his triadic economy of Subject/Knowledge/Sex, stating: "the subject, precisely in the measure that he may be unconscious, is not a representation, he is the representative (Repräsentanz) of the Vorstellung. He is there in place of the Vorstellung which is lacking" (jacques-lacan-seminar-12, p. 251). In Seminar XIII (1965–66), the term is extended to the scopic field: Velázquez's Las Meninas is read as a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz — the picture-within-the-picture is not a representation but the representative of representation, staging the gaze's structural logic (jacques-lacan-seminar-13, p. 203). In Seminar XVI (1968–69), it appears in the context of sublimation and sexual difference: "Woman" is accessible only through representatives of her representation, since the representative of her representation is constitutively lost (jacques-lacan-seminar-16, p. 222). Secondary commentators (Boothby, Johnston, Žižek) consolidate and extend these readings: Boothby emphasizes the non-representative representative function (richard-boothby-freud-as-philosopher, p. 219); Johnston traces the full evolution and the translation disputes with critical distance (self-and-emotional-life-adrian-johnston, pp. 154–161); and Žižek reads every proper name as a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz — the signifying stand-in for the unrepresentable dimension of an object (slavoj-zizek-sex-and-the-failed-absolute, p. 231).

Key formulations

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1964 (p.233)

The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier.

Lacan's most compressed and decisive theoretical equation: the Freudian metapsychological term is identified with the second signifier of the primal dyad, anchoring primal repression in signifier theory and grounding the divided subject.

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1964 (p.75)

the Vorstellungsreprasentanz. This means not, as it has been mistranslated, the representative representative… but that which takes the place of the representation (le tenant-lieu de la représentation).

Lacan's re-translation orients the concept toward the Real: the placeholder points not to another representation but to the drive and the encounter forever missed — a constitutive absence rather than a positive content.

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1964 (p.251)

the subject, precisely in the measure that he may be unconscious, is not a representation, he is the representative (Representanz) of the Vorstellung. He is there in place of the Vorstellung which is lacking: this is the meaning of the Freudian term of Vorstellungsrepresentanz.

Links the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz directly to the barred subject: the subject is constitutively the stand-in for a missing representation, making absence structural to subjectivity itself.

Seminar VII · The Ethics of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1959 (p.70)

That is not just Vorstellung, but as Freud writes later in the same article on the unconscious, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz; and he thus turns Vorstellung into an associative and combinatory element.

Identifies the precise theoretical upgrade Freud performs: by adding Repräsentanz to Vorstellung, he converts isolated mental content into a signifier-like combinatory element, justifying the claim that the unconscious is structured like a language.

Sex and the Failed AbsoluteSlavoj Žižek · 2019 (p.231)

Lacan's precise reading of Freud's concept of Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz: not simply a mental representation or idea which is the psychic representative of the biological instinct, but (much more ingeniously) the representative (stand-in, place-holder) of a missing representation.

Žižek's gloss captures the structural radicalism of Lacan's move: the term names not a positive psychic content standing in for the drive but a structural gap — the placeholder of what cannot be represented — generalizable to all master-signifiers and proper names.

Cited examples

Velázquez's Las Meninas — the canvas-within-the-canvas *(art)*

Cited by Seminar XIII · The Object of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1965 (p.203). Lacan reads the large canvas depicted inside Las Meninas not as a representation of a subject (the king and queen) but as the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz of the picture itself — the representative of representation rather than a representation. The painting-within-the-painting stands in for what constitutes the picture in its essence, enacting the structural function of the concept in the scopic field.

The 'Lenin in Warsaw' joke (a painting titled 'Lenin in Warsaw' that depicts Lenin's wife in bed with another man) *(other)*

Cited by The Sublime Object of IdeologySlavoj Žižek · 1989 (page unknown). Žižek uses this joke to illustrate the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz logic: the title 'Lenin in Warsaw' functions as the signifying element filling the vacant place of a missing representation (Lenin himself is absent from the picture). The title is the placeholder — the representative — of the representation that should be there but is not, demonstrating how the master-signifier stands in for an absent positive content.

Woody Allen's parody of Tolstoy's War and Peace — Dostoyevsky's name as 'repressed' binary signifier *(film)*

Cited by Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical MaterialismSlavoj Žižek · 2012 (page unknown). Žižek uses this example to show how the primordially repressed binary signifier (Dostoyevsky, as the feminine Master-Signifier to Tolstoy's masculine one) returns as a series of ordinary signifiers: a conversation that accidentally contains all of Dostoyevsky's novel titles. This illustrates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as the missing representative whose absence generates the multiple returns of the repressed that fill its gap.

Ruth Kjar — the painter who filled the 'empty space' left by removing a picture (discussed via Karin Mikailis's case, cited in Melanie Klein's 1929 article) *(case_study)*

Cited by Seminar VII · The Ethics of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1959 (p.127). Lacan uses this case in Seminar VII to illustrate how the network of Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen organizes the psychic apparatus around Das Ding as an excluded center. The 'empty space' the patient experienced and compulsively filled through painting literalizes the topological function of the concept: creative work circles the void left by the Thing that the signifying network cannot represent directly.

Tensions

Within the corpus

Whether Vorstellungsrepräsentanz names the first (unary) signifier or the second (binary) signifier of the primal dyad — i.e., whether it is the S1 that initiates repression or the S2 that is repressed as a consequence of the signifying coupling.

  • Lacan (Seminar XI, p. 233): 'The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier' — it is specifically the second signifier of the primal dyad, the one whose advent causes the aphanisis of the subject and constitutes the central point of Urverdrängung. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11-1 p. 233

  • Lacan (Seminar XII, p. 251): 'the subject…is the representative (Repräsentanz) of the Vorstellung. He is there in place of the Vorstellung which is lacking' — here the subject is the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, standing in for a missing Vorstellung, which implies the representative is the primary, not secondary, term, and the Vorstellung is what is lacking/repressed. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-12 p. 251

    This internal tension reflects Lacan's shifting emphasis: in Seminar XI the accent falls on the binary signifier as what is repressed (and causes aphanisis); in Seminar XII the accent falls on the subject as the structural placeholder for a missing representation — the two framings are compatible but produce different mappings of S1/S2 onto Vorstellung/Repräsentanz.

Whether affects can be unconscious at all — and thus whether Lacan's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz-based exclusion of affect from the unconscious is faithful to Freud or a motivated misreading.

  • Lacan (via Evans, evans-dylan-an-introductory-dictionary-of-lacanian-psychoanalysis-taylor-francis): 'repression does not bear upon the affect (which can only be transformed or displaced) but upon the ideational representative (which is, in Lacan's terms, the signifier)' — affects are constitutively conscious; only the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz/signifier can be repressed. — cite: evans-dylan-an-introductory-dictionary-of-lacanian-psychoanalysis-taylor-francis

  • Johnston (self-and-emotional-life-adrian-johnston, p. 151): 'it is the signifier that is repressed, there being no other meaning that can be given in these texts to the word Vorstellungsrepräsentanz. As for affects, Freud expressly formulates that they are not repressed' — but Johnston argues this reading selectively suppresses Freud's own repeated invocations of 'unconscious guilt' and the concept of 'misfelt feelings,' making Lacan's exclusion of affect from the unconscious a principled but ultimately untenable simplification of Freud's actual metapsychology. — cite: self-and-emotional-life-adrian-johnston p. 151

    This is the central intra-corpus controversy: Lacan treats the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz = signifier equation as licensing a clean excision of affect from the unconscious, while Johnston argues this excision rests on a selective reading that Freud's own texts contradict.

Across frameworks

vs Ego Psychology

Lacanian: For Lacan, what is preserved in the unconscious and drives repetition is not a content or a memory-image but a formal, signifier-like element — the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz — that is structurally indestructible precisely because it operates outside any economy of need-satisfaction or ego-adaptation. The unconscious is a Symbolic order of combinatory representatives, not a repository of affective memories awaiting abreaction or ego-integration.

Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein) treats the psychical apparatus primarily in terms of an autonomous ego managing drives and mediating between id-impulses and reality. Repression is understood as a defense mechanism deployed by the ego to manage threatening impulses, and the therapeutic aim is the strengthening of the ego's synthetic and adaptive functions — effectively treating the ideational contents of the unconscious as something to be metabolized into ego-syntonic form.

Fault line: The deep disagreement is over the ontological status of what is repressed: for Lacan, the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is a pure signifier-function that cannot be 'integrated' because it constitutes the subject's division as such; for ego psychology, repressed ideational contents are potentially recuperable by an autonomous ego whose structural integrity is the goal of treatment.

vs Object Oriented Ontology

Lacanian: The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz names the structural placeholder for what the signifying order cannot represent — the Real, das Ding, the drive's pressure — but this 'missing' dimension is not a withdrawn object with its own autonomous existence; it is the constitutive lack internal to the symbolic order itself, produced by the signifier's own operation.

Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman) holds that every object — including psychic objects — withdraws from any relational or linguistic access, harboring a sensual-real surplus that cannot be exhausted by its relations or representations. From this perspective, the drive and its 'missing' representation would be understood as an object that genuinely withdraws, not as a structural gap produced by language.

Fault line: OOO posits real withdrawal as the condition of objects as such, making absence ontologically primary across all domains; Lacanian theory locates absence specifically in the subject's relation to the symbolic order — the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is a lack produced by the signifier, not a universal feature of object-being independent of language.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz marks the constitutive incompleteness of the subject: what is repressed is not a potential that awaits realization but a structural representative whose very function is to sustain desire as unsatisfied. There is no 'full' self beneath repression; the unconscious is organized around a lack that cannot be filled.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow) conceives of repression as the blocking of authentic self-experience and genuine feeling. Therapeutic work aims at removing these blocks so that the organism's inherent tendency toward growth and self-actualization can resume. The ideal endpoint is a congruent, fully experiencing self, not a divided subject.

Fault line: The fault line is between a constitutive lack (Lacanian) and a contingent blockage (humanistic): for Lacan, the division marked by the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is structural to any subject who speaks, not a correctable impediment to flourishing; for humanistic approaches, repression is an unfortunate obstacle to an otherwise realizable wholeness.

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (68)

  1. #01

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_203"></span>**Thing**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concept of *das Ding* (the Thing) functions as both the real object beyond symbolisation and the forbidden object of incestuous desire/jouissance, and that this concept serves as the conceptual precursor to *objet petit a*, which inherits and develops its key structural features from 1963 onwards.

    Freud's distinction between 'word-presentations' (Wortvorstellungen) and 'thing-presentations' (Sachvorstellungen). This distinction is prominent in Freud's metapsychological writings

  2. #02

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_14"></span>**affect**

    Theoretical move: Lacan dissolves the classical affect/intellect opposition by grounding affect in the symbolic order rather than treating it as a primary, pre-discursive realm; the implication is that psychoanalytic treatment targets the truth of desire through speech, not abreaction, and that affects function as signals tied to the subject's relation with the Other—with anxiety uniquely singled out as the non-deceptive affect.

    repression does not bear upon the affect (which can only be transformed or displaced) but upon the ideational representative (which is, in Lacan's terms, the signifier)

  3. #03

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_171"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0192"></span>**repression**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that repression, understood through Lacan's reworking of Freud, is the structural operation that defines neurosis among the clinical structures; primal repression is recast not as a datable psychical act but as the structural incompleteness of language itself, while secondary repression is formalised as a metaphoric operation in which repression and the return of the repressed are identical.

    This latter view seems to correspond more closely to Freud's view that what is repressed is not the 'affect'... but the 'ideational representative' of the drive.

  4. #04

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.135

    **6** > <span id="page-128-0"></span>**7 Interlude**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology, developed through the prosopopoeia of a talking lectern in "The Freudian Thing," demonstrates that ego psychology's own theoretical premises cannot distinguish the ego from an inanimate object, thereby refuting its claims to autonomous ego-subjectivity and exposing its capitulation to Anglo-American cultural and scientific norms as a betrayal of Freud.

    an accompanying, enveloping network of associations consisting of representations (Vorstellungen) and signifiers able to be brought to conscious light in and through the interpretive work of analysis.

  5. #05

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.194

    **11**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian subject is constituted through the Symbolic order (big Other as "locus of speech"), and that the Freudian unconscious must be accounted for in strictly Symbolic—not phenomenological-Imaginary—terms, with the unconscious's peculiar atemporality, repetition, and desire explained through the structural mediation of signifiers and the Hegelian-Kojèvian desire-for-recognition.

    Freud's Vorstellungen as Lacan's signifers…these Vorstellungen/signifers take on lives of their own, relating to other Vorstellungen/signifers according to intra-Symbolic laws of interaction.

  6. #06

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.199

    **11**

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's early-to-mid-1950s account of the unconscious articulates a structural Symbolic order (automaton) arising out of Real contingency (tuché), grounding both the compulsive repetition of unrecognized desire in transference and the curative mechanism of analysis in Hegelian-Kojèvian recognition theory, while simultaneously positioning Lacan as a proto-post-structuralist who preserves a place for the Real beyond Lévi-Straussian structuralism, and linking the Symbolic unconscious to sexuality via the Maussian/Lévi-Straussian incest prohibition and the master/slave dialectic.

    the unconscious of the early Freud… with its signifier-like ideational representations (Vorstellungen) in such phenomena as dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes

  7. #07

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.206

    **11**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that biological need (hunger as the oral drive) undergoes a transformational sublation into signifier-mediated demands and desires through Imaginary and Symbolic mediations, and that this Freudian-Lacanian thesis is reinforced by Hegel's (via Kojève) dialectic of recognition, wherein bare survival becomes inextricably entangled with intersubjective recognition—while the ego's resistance to recognizing the unconscious is recast as the Imaginary blocking Symbolic (full) speech.

    drive-objects as more-than-biological Vorstellungen/signifers, and all the experiential, linguistic, and social signifcances with which these Vorstellungen/signifers are inseparably associated, come to form nodal points of the unconscious.

  8. #08

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.209

    **11**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's appeal to Freudian guilt in "The Locus of Speech" serves to establish the primacy of the Symbolic unconscious over Imaginary affect, and that post-Freudian analysts (ego psychologists, object-relations theorists) reverse this priority by reducing analysis to imaginary-affective phenomena, producing "general infantilization" and ideological distortion—culminating in analysts misidentifying themselves with the Subject Supposed to Know.

    the Symbolic Vorstellungen/signifers with which Imaginary affect is always-already intertwined are subjected to repression and the like, being the networked constellations and formations in and through which unconscious dimensions enter into play.

  9. #09

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.230

    **12**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian analysis works not by destroying the ego but by attuning consciousness to the Symbolic rather than the Imaginary register, such that the truth of the unconscious is revealed not as profound meaning but as opaque, material, contingent nonsense—an anti-hermeneutical conclusion where analytic endings are reductions to absurdity rather than arrivals at depth, grounded in the pure materiality of the signifier.

    what seems unreasonable to the consciousness of analyst and/or analysand can be shown...to be eminently reasonable once certain repressed mental contents qua Vorstellungen and their inter-connections are brought to light

  10. #10

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.48

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *Presentation of the Suite*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious operates through the ordered chains of formal language rather than through any biological property of living memory, and that repetition-automatism arises not from the real but from "what was not"—thereby grounding the symbolic order as sufficient to explain the indestructibility of the unconscious and orienting psychoanalytic training toward the question of how formal language determines the subject.

    the links of this order are the only ones that can be suspected to suffice to account for Freud's notion of the indestructibility of what his unconscious preserves.

  11. #11

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.504

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > *V, Postscript* > *Notes*

    Theoretical move: This postscript's notes advance the theoretical work of the Schreber article by: (1) retroactively clarifying that the R schema lays flat a cross-cap and that the cut *mi*/MI isolates a Möbius strip, thereby grounding fantasy's structure topologically; and (2) situating objet petit a within the R schema to articulate how reality is sustained only by the extraction of object a and propped up by the barred subject as representation's representative.

    It is thus as representation's representative in fantasy—that is, as the originally repressed subject—that #, the barred S of desire, props up the field of reality here

  12. #12

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.615

    In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical reading of Jones' theory of symbolism to argue that the signifier—not affect—is what is repressed, and that the phallus exemplifies the signifier's function as marker of the subject's constitutive loss, thereby subordinating Jones' developmental biologism to a properly structural account of desire, condensation, displacement, metaphor, and metonymy.

    there being no other meaning that can be given in these texts to the word Vorstellungsrepräsentanz

  13. #13

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.630

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *IV. The Shine* /Eclat/ *of Absences*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the theoretical impasse around feminine sexuality—left unresolved since the phallic-phase debates of 1927–1935—cannot be overcome without distinguishing the imaginary, real, and symbolic registers of the phallus, and subordinating developmental questions to a fundamental synchrony in which the relation of not-being (manque à être) symbolized by the phallus is constituted as a diversion from the not-having (manque à avoir) produced by frustrated demand.

    The representation (Vorstellung in the sense in which Freud uses the term when he notes that it is what is repressed) of female sexuality, whether it is repressed or not, conditions its implementation

  14. #14

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.707

    The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > GRAPH 2

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is constitutively structured through the Other's desire and the margin opened by demand's excess over need, while critiquing Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic for repressing jouissance and showing that the symbolic order (including the Name-of-the-Father and the law of no metalanguage) always already dominates the imaginary register of ego-formation.

    representation's representative in the absolute condition is in its proper place in the unconscious, where it causes desire in accordance with the structure of fantasy

  15. #15

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.768

    On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Appendix I: A Spoken Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" by Jean Hyppolite

    Theoretical move: Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" argues that negation is not merely a logical operation but a constitutive act — the Aufhebung of repression — whose structure (presenting being in the mode of not-being-it) yields a genesis of thought itself, readable through Hegelian dialectics (negation of negation, Aufhebung) and implicating the primordial couple of Eros/expulsion as the mythical ground of both attributive and existential judgment.

    it asserts or disputes that a representation [Vorstellung] has an existence in reality... the subject reproduces his representation of things based on the initial perception he had of them.

  16. #16

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.829

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject<sup>1</sup> > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTE S TO "TH E SITUATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE TRAININ G OF PSYCHOANALYSTS IN 1956" > NOTES TO "O N A QUESTION \*

    Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of editorial and translator's notes to Lacan's Écrits, providing glosses on French/German terms, bibliographic references, and cross-references to seminars and other texts; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own.

    Representant de la representation (representation's representative) is Lacan's translation for Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz... In Seminar VII, Lacan equates Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz with the signifier (page 75-76/61).

  17. #17

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.855

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject<sup>1</sup> > NOTES TO IN MEMORY OF ERNEST JONES: O N HIS THEORY OF SYMBOLISM" > NOTE S T O "GUIDIN G REMARK S FO R A CONVENTIO N O N FEMAL E SEXUALITY " > NOTE S T O "TH E SUBVERSIO N O F TH E SUBJECT "

    Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editor's footnotes to Lacan's Écrits, providing philological, terminological, and bibliographical annotations; it contains no independent theoretical argument but does clarify several Lacanian concepts through translation commentary.

    Representant de la representation (representation's representative) is Lacan's translation for Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz ... In Seminar VII, Lacan equates Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz with the signifier (pages 75–76/61).

  18. #18

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.887

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *Position of the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it comprises editorial apparatus for the Écrits — bibliographic notes on individual essays' publication histories and a classified index of Freudian German terms with their page references — and makes no independent theoretical argument.

    Vorstellungsreprasentanz, 714

  19. #19

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.242

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan locates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz at the precise point where the vel between signifier and subject is enacted, distinguishing this from the mirror-relation, and uses this to delimit the psychosomatic as a signifying induction that does not trigger aphanisis of the subject—thereby limiting the scope of psychoanalytic interpretation.

    The point at which the plug of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is connected … is the point that I told you was the virtual point of the function of freedom, in as much as the choice, the vel, is manifested there between the signifier and the subject.

  20. #20

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.233

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: The passage identifies the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz with the binary signifier and locates it as the pivot of primal repression (Urverdrangung), while showing that the subject's division between meaning and fading (aphanisis) is constituted by the signifying coupling; separation is then introduced as the operation by which the subject finds the weak point of this alienating dyad and recovers desire from the interval between signifiers.

    The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier.

  21. #21

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.232

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan defends his translation of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as "representative of the representation" against critics who prefer "representative representative," arguing that the precise rendering is theoretically decisive: what is repressed is not the signified/affect but the signifier-representative itself, and that the misreading of this point exemplifies the alienating passage through another's signifiers.

    The Vorstellungsrepr&entanz is the representative representative (le reprCsentant reprIsentatif), let us say.

  22. #22

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.235

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: it extends the Master/Slave dialectic to reveal that the master's alienation reaches its radical limit precisely in the moment of terror (where freedom collapses into death), and it then clarifies the Freudian concept of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz by distinguishing the signifier-as-pure-representative from signification, arguing that the signifier must be understood at the opposite pole from meaning.

    Do I need to stress that we must understand Reprdsentanz here in the sense in which things happens at the real level, where communication takes place in every human domain.

  23. #23

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.75

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Real is located beyond the dream—behind the 'lack of representation' whose only delegate is the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz—and that this Real, identical with the Trieb, is what governs repetition; fantasy functions merely as a screen concealing this primary determinant, while awakening itself operates in two directions simultaneously.

    the Vorstellungsreprasentanz. This means not, as it has been mistranslated, the representative representative… but that which takes the place of the representation (le tenant-lieu de la représentation).

  24. #24

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on Freud's concept of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as a site of repression, and uses the master/slave dialectic's vel-structure to articulate how alienation operates through a necessary condition that causes the loss of the original requirement — linking Freudian repression to the logic of alienation.

    Today I would like to show you the importance, already designated by my schema last time, of what Freud calls, at the level of repression, the Vorstellung… There are therefore two terms— Vorstellung, Repräsentanz.

  25. #25

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.232

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > APHANISIS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper translation of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as "representative of representation" (rather than "representative representative") is theoretically decisive: repression bears on the representative-signifier, not on the affect or the signified content, and misreading this point via "alienation" within his own school distorts the entire theory of desire.

    The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the representative representative (le représentant représentatif), let us say.

  26. #26

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.235

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two linked theoretical moves: it radicalises the Master/Slave dialectic by showing that the master's freedom collapses into pure death (illustrated through Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine), and then distinguishes the Freudian Vorstellungsrepräsentanz from Vorstellung by aligning the former with the pure function of the signifier — stripped of intersubjective signification — against the latter's representational content.

    Do I need to stress that we must understand Reprdsentanz here in the sense in which things happens at the real level, where communication takes place in every human domain.

  27. #27

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.242

    THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: APHANISIS > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan locates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz at the precise point where the vel between signifier and subject is enacted, distinguishing it from the mirror-relation and the Subject Supposed to Know, and uses this to demarcate the psychosomatic as a signifying induction that bypasses aphanisis—thus limiting but not eliminating analytic interpretation.

    The point at which the plug of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is connected—and this is of great importance to what I have said today—is the point that I told you was the virtual point of the function of freedom, in as much as the choice, the vel, is manifested there between the signifier and the subject.

  28. #28

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.251

    **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan articulates a triadic "rotating dominance" between Subject, Knowledge (unconscious), and Sex, arguing that the unconscious is a knowledge whose subject remains undetermined precisely because Sex marks the impossible-to-know point around which this economy turns; the game (as formal structure) is then introduced as the reduction of this triadic dialectic to the dyadic tension of subject-waiting-for-knowledge, with the impossible (sex/the real) converted into the stake.

    the subject, precisely in the measure that he may be unconscious, is not a representation, he is the representative *(Representanz)* of the *Vorstellung.* He is there in place of the *Vorstellung* which is lacking: this is the meaning of the Freudian term of *Vorstellungsrepresentanz.*

  29. #29

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's *Las Meninas* to distinguish the picture from the mirror and to argue that the scopic field reveals the subject's constitutive division: the picture is not representation but the *Vorstellungsrepresentanz* (representative of the representation), and the Objet petit a occupies the interval between the plane of fantasy and the picture-plane, which is the only genuine *Dasein* of the divided subject.

    It is structure different to any representation. It is in this connection that I insist on the essential difference constituted by this term of representative of the representation, Vorstellungsrepresentanz, borrowed from Freud.

  30. #30

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's *Las Meninas* as a structural demonstration of the gaze: the painting-within-the-painting operates as a *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz* that reveals how pictorial representation does not represent but rather stages (en représentation), and Velázquez's self-insertion as the looking subject (sujet regardant) marks the point where the subject is captured by the gaze, designating the space in front of the picture as the topological site of the viewing subject.

    once again we find in it the crosschecking with my formula which means that the pictorial object is a Vorstellungs-representanz.

  31. #31

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect, like the representative of the drive, must be re-categorised as a form of signifier — demonstrated by Freud's progressive specification of Verleugnung alongside Verdrängung — and that this re-categorisation reveals a reduplicated non-identity (Entzweiung) at the heart of the signifier itself, which the Lacanian formula of the signifier representing a subject for another signifier must be extended to accommodate.

    the Vorstellungrepräsentanz, the representative representating, the representative of representation, what takes the place of representation. We know that it enters into the combinatorial.

  32. #32

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the picture from the mirror by theorising the picture as the "representative of the representation" (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz): the scopic field of the picture inscribes both the Objet petit a and the division of the subject through projective topology, where the subject's "there" (Dasein) is not a presence but the gap/interval between two parallel planes — the picture-plane and the fantasy-window — in which the object a falls.

    It is in this connection that I insist on the essential difference constituted by this term of representative of the representation, Vorstellungsrepresentanz, borrowed from Freud.

  33. #33

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's *Las Meninas* as a structural demonstration of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz: the picture-within-the-picture does not represent but rather *presentifies* the window-space of the gaze, showing that what constitutes the picture in its essence is not representation but the capture of the looking subject (sujet regardant) — a topology that introduces the dialectic of the subject via the scopic drive.

    the pictorial object is a Vorstellungs-representanz… what constitutes the picture in its essence is not representation

  34. #34

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.38

    III - THE RELATION o TO i(o) AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION AND SPECULARISATION.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that affect must be granted the status of a signifier — on a par with the drive-representative (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz) — by tracing Freud's progressive distinction between Verleugnung (denial, bearing on perception) and Verdrängung (repression, bearing on affect), and then proposes that the signifier itself be redefined to include both registers, thereby grounding a reduplicated Entzweiung (splitting) at the heart of the subject.

    Considerations of terminology are not useless here. It is not for nothing that it has long being discussed whether the Vorstellungrepräsentanz, the representative representating, the representative of representation, what takes the place of representation

  35. #35

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes *savoir* (knowledge as operative, structural) from *connaissance* (knowing as representation), and uses Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiment to argue that what is truly demonstrated there is the structural formula of the signifier — that "the signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier" — thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in any organo-dynamic or spiritualist model.

    this is how there ought to be translated the German term in Freud of Vorstellungreprasentanz. That it is not because of a simple personal sensitivity that every time that I see emerging in one or other marginal note the translation ideational-representative, I only denounce in it

  36. #36

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Pavlovian conditioned reflex as a structural illustration to argue that the signifier's operation always implies the presence of a subject, while simultaneously distinguishing knowledge-as-savoir from mere representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz), thereby grounding the psychoanalytic act in a logic of the signifier rather than in organo-dynamic or idealist models.

    the insistence that I put on the fact that this is how there ought to be translated the German term in Freud of Vorstellungreprasentanz... every time that I see emerging in one or other marginal note the translation ideational-representative, I only denounce in it... a confusing intention

  37. #37

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.222

    Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of a sexual signifier means Woman is irreducibly unknown, accessible only through representatives of representation (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz); sublimation is then theorised as the objet petit a functioning as what "tickles das Ding from the inside," linking drive topology (edge-structure, vacuole) to the production of art and courtly love.

    it is by one or several representatives of representation, this is indeed a case of highlighting the function of this term that Freud introduces in connection with repression... the representative of her representation is lost

  38. #38

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.214

    Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation, as Freud formulates it, is a mode of drive satisfaction that operates *with* the drive (mit dem Trieb) rather than through repression, and that its satisfaction is achieved precisely by being goal-inhibited (zielgehemmt) — eliding the sexual goal while still satisfying the drive. This pivot is used to distinguish sublimation structurally from repression and to set up the question of what exactly is satisfied when the drive bypasses its sexual goal. The passage also stages a critical dialogue with Deleuze's appropriation of Lacanian concepts, particularly around the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.

    what is essential in a correct translation, which comes back to saying in a correct articulation, of the function described as Vorstellungsrepräsentanz and of its effective incidence with respect to the unconscious.

  39. #39

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.210

    Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 > Seminar 12: Wednesday 13 May 1970

    Theoretical move: In this informal Q&A transcription, Lacan defends the centrality of affect in his work by distinguishing his translation of Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz from the 'ideational representative' reading, argues that repression displaces rather than suppresses affect, and retrospectively links the Discourse of the Master to his 1962 Seminar on Anxiety while positioning Kierkegaard as a historical moment in the conceptualization of anxiety within an economy of jouissance.

    Freud has recourse to this famous Repräsentanz that I translate as representative of representation, and which others, and moreover not for nothing, persist in calling ideational representative

  40. #40

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.68

    THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

    Theoretical move: The dream about the dead father is analyzed as a metaphor produced by the elision (subtraction) of signifiers, where repression operates at the level of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz rather than content; this analysis hinges on the distinction between signifying elision and repression, and opens toward the graph of desire, fantasy, and the differential clinical significance of similar structures across neurosis and psychosis.

    What is repressed here is indubitably a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, one that is even quite typical... it is certainly something that is, in and of itself, I would say, a form that is devoid of meaning.

  41. #41

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.127

    **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of sublimation grounded in the topological function of Das Ding: the Thing is that which "in the real suffers from the signifier," is constitutively veiled, and is represented—never directly encountered—by the created object, whose paradigmatic form is the potter's vase, a void-around-which that enacts creation ex nihilo.

    there is nothing between the organization in the signifying network, in the network of Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen, and the constitution in the real of the space or central place in which the field of the Thing as such presents itself to us.

  42. #42

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70

    **V**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's *Entwurf* around *das Ding* as the original lost object that structures the entire movement of *Vorstellungen* under the pleasure principle, while establishing that the unconscious is organized according to the laws of condensation/displacement (metaphor/metonymy), and that access to thought processes requires their mediation through word-representations (*Wort-Vorstellungen*) in preconsciousness — thereby grounding the ethics of psychoanalysis in the constitutive distance from *das Ding*.

    That is not just Vorstellung, but as Freud writes later in the same article on the unconscious, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz; and he thus turns Vorstellung into an associative and combinatory element.

  43. #43

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.80

    **VI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that *das Ding* occupies a paradoxical topological position—excluded yet central—and that the subject's entire relation to the good (Wohl), the pleasure principle, repetition, and the reality principle is organized around this primordial excluded exterior; ethics proper begins only beyond these structural coordinates, at the point where the unconscious lie (proton pseudos) marks the subject's constitutive inability to directly approach das Ding.

    do not look upon that as a simple pleonasm, for 'represent' and 'representation' here are two different things, as the term Vorstellungsrepräsentanz indicates

  44. #44

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus (Φ) functions as a privileged signifier that uniquely arrests the infinite deferral of the signifying chain, and that the subject's unnameable relation to this signifier of desire is what organizes both fantasy and the symptomatic effects of the castration complex — exemplified through a reading of Dora's hysteria as a game of substituting imaginary φ where the veiled Φ is sought.

    The point is to ensure that the signs are there, but qua signs - since they are signs of a relation to something else. This is what Freud means... the unconscious gravitates around a lost object that can only ever be refound.

  45. #45

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the automatism of repetition is not merely a tension-discharge cycle but is fundamentally structured by a signifying function: what repeats is always in service of making a lost signifier (the *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz*) re-emerge, and repression is precisely the loss of that signifying 'number' behind the apparent psychological motivations of behaviour.

    that we are in analytic experience (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz): this is what is repressed, it is the lost number of behaviour such and such.

  46. #46

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.219

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > <span id="ch4.xhtml_p216" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 216. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Speaking of the Thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that das Ding is accessible only through language, and that the signifier's binary (presence/absence) structure is what enables it to "represent the unrepresented" — functioning as Vorstellungsrepräsentanz — thereby opening a dimension of constitutive absence in perception that orients speech toward das Ding as its primordial, indeterminate horizon.

    "The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz" says Lacan, "is the binary signifier" (FFC, 218, emphasis added).

  47. #47

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.105

    8. > Toward a New Conception of Affects

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the question of whether affects can be unconscious is the central unresolved problem at the intersection of psychoanalytic metapsychology and clinical practice, and that Freud's introduction of the superego and second topography forces a reconsideration of the consciousness-requirement for affect—with guilt as the paradigmatic test case revealing the theoretical difficulties this creates.

    consciousness of guilt as an affect is cut off from its appropriate ideational correlates, from its corresponding representations (Vorstellungen that, in this instance, remain unconscious)

  48. #48

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.107

    8. > Toward a New Conception of Affects

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's dismissal of unconscious affects rests on a misreading of Freud's 1915 metapsychology, and that the same logic by which Lacan insists one can think without knowing one thinks should compel him to entertain the possibility that one can feel without knowing one feels — opening the way for a Lacanian-neuroscientific synthesis that would dissolve the rigid signifier/affect dualism in psychoanalytic metapsychology.

    Freud himself stipulates that the unconscious, as the proper object of psychoanalysis, is woven solely of Vorstellungen, and not affects

  49. #49

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.116

    9. > F r e u d a n d t h e U n r e s o lv e d P r o b l e m of Unconscious Guilt

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Freud's concept of "unconscious guilt" predates the second topography and cannot be resolved by simply mapping it onto the ego/superego framework; instead, the passage proposes that unconscious affects are "misfelt feelings"—consciously registered but phenomenologically displaced onto other affects (e.g., guilt felt as anxiety)—thereby reframing the apparent contradiction in Freud's metapsychology of affect.

    not conscious of the connections between the ideational representations (Vorstellungen) acting as the mental content (i.e., the associations between ideas, memories, symbols, words, and so on) catalyzing their obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions

  50. #50

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.119

    9. > F r e u d a n d t h e U n r e s o lv e d P r o b l e m of Unconscious Guilt

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Freud's unresolved metapsychological tension around unconscious guilt—an affect that cannot, by his own theory, be unconscious—showing how this problem drives the concepts of negative therapeutic reaction, moral masochism, the superego's sadism, and civilizational guilt, while Johnston argues that the phenomenon of "misfelt feelings" is the best way to make sense of Freud's compelled but hedged positing of an unconscious sense of guilt.

    he is 'compelled' to posit this despite his 'better critical judgment' as a metapsychologist for whom affects, unlike Vorstellungen, cannot be unconscious

  51. #51

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.131

    10. > F r e u d 's M e ta p s y c h o l o g i e s of Affective Life

    Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's metapsychological treatment of the affect/idea (Affekt/Vorstellung) distinction from 1894 to 1915, the passage argues that Freud's own texts — against their standard reading — open the door to the theoretical possibility of unconscious affects and 'misfelt feelings,' a concept Johnston proposes to resolve the metapsychological ambiguity between affect as necessarily conscious and affect as subject to defensive displacement.

    it may happen that an affective or emotional impulse is perceived but misconstrued … Owing to the repression of its proper representative [eigentlichen Repräsentanz] it has been forced to become connected

  52. #52

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.133

    10. > F r e u d 's M e ta p s y c h o l o g i e s of Affective Life

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Freud's 1915 metapsychology of affect is internally contradictory: while Freud formally denies the existence of unconscious affects (reducing them to protoaffective ideational potentials), his own tripartite German terminology (Affekte/Gefühle/Empfindungen) and the logic of "true/false connections" between affect and Vorstellung open conceptual space for a coherent theory of unconscious or "misfelt" affects that Lacan's sweeping denial forecloses prematurely.

    this affect's expression in 'true connection' with its 'proper representative [eigentlichen Repräsentanz]' versus this affect's expression, after the vicissitude of being detached and displaced from its real corresponding ideational representation, in 'false connection' with 'another idea [anderen Vorstellung]'

  53. #53

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.141

    10. > F r e u d 's M e ta p s y c h o l o g i e s of Affective Life

    Theoretical move: By carefully parsing Freud's 1915 German terminology (Affektbildung, Affektbetrag, Affekt-qua-Gefühl, Empfindung), the passage argues that Freud's metapsychology of affect is more complex and less consistent than both Lacanian and Anglo-American inheritors acknowledge, and that Pulver's clinical categories of "unconscious affects" and "potential affects" largely rediscover distinctions already latent in Freud—setting up a critique of Lacan's tendency to reduce affect to a secondary by-product of ideational-representational structure.

    constellations of repressed ideational representations with the potential to give rise to a corresponding affect or affects, namely, constellations of unconscious ideas (Vorstellungen) liable to provoke particular feeling-states

  54. #54

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.147

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that both Freud and Lacan are genuinely inconsistent in their theorizations of affect, and traces Lacan's shifting positions from an initial dialectical entanglement of the affective and intellectual toward an increasingly unidirectional priority of signifier-ideas over affects—a move Johnston critiques as a motivated misreading that subordinates affect to the ideational order of the unconscious.

    ideas as Vorstellungen, to be identified by Lacan as 'signifiers') can become unconscious through repression

  55. #55

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.151

    11.

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's sustained subordination of affect to the signifier/Vorstellungsrepräsentanz rests on a selective and partially erroneous reading of Freud's 1915 metapsychology, and proposes instead (following Green) that affect and ideational structure are primordially indistinct—their separation being a secondary abstraction produced by repression itself.

    it is the signifier that is repressed, there being no other meaning that can be given in these texts to the word Vorstellungsrepräsentanz. As for affects, Freud expressly formulates that they are not repressed

  56. #56

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.154

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's reading of Freud's *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz* as a purely signifier-relational structure (the "binary signifier" or S1-S2 dyad) is theoretically productive but ultimately problematic insofar as it brackets the affective-libidinal saturation of repressed drive representatives, and that a more adequate metapsychology requires the Real as the non-Symbolic catalyst driving signifying chains.

    The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier… this Vorstellungsrepräsentanz . . . is . . . the signifying S2 of the dyad.

  57. #57

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.161

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's metapsychology of affect—centered on the claim that affect is not repressed but "unfastened," displaced, and estranged from signifiers—constitutes a principled theoretical position rather than a neglect of affect; crucially, this entails that the parlêtre's affective life is irreducibly alienated from signifier-mediated subjectivity, such that there is no representational rapport between affect and signifier.

    I have simply given its full importance, in the determinism of die Verneinung [negation], to what Freud has explicitly stated, that it's not affect that is repressed. Freud has recourse to this famous Repräsentanz which I translate as représentant de la représentation

  58. #58

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.169

    11.

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *lalangue* (aligned with Freudian primary process) is the site where jouissance and language intertwine as *jouis-sens*, generating enigmatic affects that are structurally deceptive—with anxiety as the singular non-deceptive affect—thereby positioning affect as a product of the *parlêtre*'s capture in discourse rather than as transparent self-evidence.

    primary process mentation disregards such concerns and the accompanying restrictions they dictate... forges links between Vorstellungen in unconventional fashions, sometimes exhibiting a surprising degree of creativity and inventiveness.

  59. #59

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.191

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a psychoanalytic (Freudian-Lacanian) metapsychology of affect supplements Damasio's neuroscientific account by locating the unconscious not as a hidden depth-node but as dissonant, defensive interventions *between* the levels of affective translation (emotion → feeling-had → feeling-known), and further that Damasio's model omits the Lacanian barred subject — the empty negativity of the Cogito — which is irreducible to either embodied core selfhood or autobiographical symbolic identity.

    consists of Triebrepräsentanzen (drive representatives), namely, the psychical inscriptions both structurally articulated and energetically charged that form the coordinates of the drives' aims (Ziele) and objects (Objekte)

  60. #60

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.240

    13. > The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy > Psychoanalysis: Are There Unconscious Feelings?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud and Lacan's shared thesis—that affects are always conscious and the unconscious is constituted by signifiers/representations, not affects—runs into paradox through the concept of "misfelt feelings" (guilt, anxiety), and that this psychoanalytic topology of drive, representation, and affect is now challenged by neurobiology's discovery of an emotionally competent, symbolically active brain.

    the ideational representative [Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, représentant-représentation] and the quota of affect.

  61. #61

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.244

    13. > The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy > Psychoanalysis: Are There Unconscious Feelings?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that homeostasis is not a mechanistic energetic process but an affective, auto-representative structure: the brain's self-regulation constitutes a "cerebral unconscious" grounded in autoaffection rather than in Freudian energetics, thereby challenging the classical psychoanalytic separation of the unconscious from biological self-regulation and redefining the unconscious as the autoaffection of the brain in its entirety.

    there exists a cerebral activity of representation different from that put forward by Freud under the name of representation (représentance), which was examined earlier. This change of conception has considerable consequences, since it has to do with nothing less than a change in the very meaning of the unconscious.

  62. #62

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.289

    13. > Inde x > affects (*continued*)

    Theoretical move: This index passage maps the book's theoretical terrain by cross-referencing key psychoanalytic, philosophical, and neuroscientific concepts around affect, unconscious affect, autoaffection, and the body-mind connection, revealing how the text triangulates Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology with neuroscience and Continental philosophy.

    confusion caused by translations of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, Vorstellung, and Repräsentanz, 125–32

  63. #63

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.292

    13. > Inde x > Freud, Sigmund (*continued*)

    Theoretical move: This index chunk maps the theoretical terrain of a Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology of affects, tracking key debates around unconscious affects, the priority of signifiers over affects, the translation problems around Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, and Lacan's neologisms (lalangue, jouis-sens, senti-ment) as attempts to articulate the affective-linguistic interface — while situating these debates in relation to neuroscience, neurobiology, and continental philosophy.

    representation and the confusion caused by translations of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, Vorstellung, and Repräsentanz, 125–32, 135–37

  64. #64

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.298

    13. > Inde x > Freud, Sigmund (*continued*)

    Theoretical move: This is an index section of an academic book, listing topics, thinkers, and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical passage, functioning purely as a navigational aid to the book's arguments.

    Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, 125–32, 136–37

  65. #65

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.231

    13. > Affects Are Si gnifier s

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian distinction between affects and signifiers collapses under the combined pressure of Freud and affective neuroscience: affects are not merely consciously felt feelings (Empfindungen) but can mislead as to *what* they are—not just why—which means the affect/signifier distinction is better understood as a distinction internal to the category of the signifier itself, yielding the "infinite judgment" that affects are signifiers.

    Freud's Vorstellung and Lacan's signifier and, on the other hand, affective phenomena as distinct from such ideational representations and their logics or structures.

  66. #66

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.231

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Möbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality](#contents.xhtml_ahd13)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the name-as-quilting-point and objet a are structurally intertwined but distinct: the Master-Signifier sutures signifier and signified by "falling into" the signified, while objet a is what gives the Master-Signifier its auratic surplus, emerging not as what castration eliminates but as the positive form of the lack castration opens up — a rebuttal to any nominalist/Ockhamist reduction of this fictive-yet-necessary supplement.

    Lacan's precise reading of Freud's concept of Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz: not simply a mental representation or idea which is the psychic representative of the biological instinct, but (much more ingeniously) the representative (stand-in, place-holder) of a missing representation.

  67. #67

    The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

    INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's proposition "there is no metalanguage" must be taken literally—not as post-structuralist infinite self-referentiality, but as the necessity of an irreducible object (objet petit a) excluded from yet internal to the symbolic order; the "Lenin in Warsaw" joke illustrates the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz logic of the master signifier, while the conscript joke illustrates how the object is produced by, yet cannot be reduced to, the signifying texture itself.

    the title of this picture functions as the Freudian vorstellungsreprasentanz: the representative, the substitute of some representation, the signifying element filling out the vacant place of the missing representation

  68. #68

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.40

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Master-Signifier operates as a reflexive "quilting point" that transforms disorder into order without adding positive content, and that objet petit a functions as the "transcendental scheme" of fantasy mediating between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects in reality — thereby explaining how ideology schematizes desire and hegemonizes the void left by the primordially repressed binary signifier.

    what is 'primordially repressed' is the binary signifier (that of Vorstellungs-Repräsentanz): what the symbolic order precludes is the full harmonious presence of the couple of Master-Signifiers, S1–S2