ABSTRACT
Many authors argue that the Freudian theory has to be understood today in a metaphorical sense, but this removes the explicative meaning that it had in Freud and reduces it to a clinical model, depriving it of the very meaning of theory. Freud took nineteenth century neurophysiology, dominated by electrophysiological studies, as his model: electrophysiology, by implying the importance of electric charges, suggested a conception of a flow of energy at the basis of the functioning of the brain. In Freud's time, the memory was considered more or less still as Ebbinghaus and many other pioneers of psychology had studied it: an engraved trace, that is, faithful to the reality that had been perceived and as such remembered: if it was not faithful, it was not considered memory, but deficit of memory. Repression is a concept that was structured by the primal wonder in the face of the discovery of the resistance of patients to interpretation.
