ABSTRACT
The notions of figurability and the work of figurability presented themselves to us progressively during the experience of treating unrepresented or insufficiently represented mental states, beginning with the treatment of young children who were considered in France as pre-psychotic. Anna Freud abandoned the view that dreams are wish-fulfilments of the infantile past in favour of a view of the dream as an attempted fulfilment. For the first task of the dream-work, its motor and its raison d’etre, was no longer the quest for a fulfilment but the imperious necessity for psychic life to elaborate the ahistorical unrepresented traumas, to give them a meaning by creating links. Conviction is a psychic process sui generis present in many very different manifestations of psychic life. The encounter between two psyches in the conditions that are obtained in the analytic setting is at the origin of a very particular mode of psychic functioning that we study under the term of regredience.
