Language and the unconscious

In his earliest works, Freud considered the ‘contents’ of the unconscious, its memories, perceptions, and sensations, as a series of neuronal impingements. In later texts, he sees them more in terms of a series or chain of ‘ideational representatives’ (Vorstellungsre-präsentanz), ‘representational representatives’ ¹ of sexual drives. He specifies that the ideational representative is ‘a succession of inscriptions and signs’ – not signs of a drive, but signs by means of which the drive is delegated a place in the unconscious (1914c). The energetic component of the drive and its ideational representative become ‘fixed’ together during the act of primal repression which constitutes the unconscious as a system distinct from consciousness, separated by a barrier of censorship. Ideally, with the resolution of the oedipus complex, the newly formed superego represses the forbidden desire for the mother. If primal repression is conditioned on the formation of the superego, this means that in the case of the pre-oedipal child, there is no barrier of repression to prevent a perceptual impulse from gaining access to consciousness: the conscious and the unconscious are not yet distinct systems governed by two forms of organization or two separate libidinal economies (the primary and secondary processes):

we have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance to the conscious. With this, a fixation is established, the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it.

(1914c: 148)