ABSTRACT
Freud's entire theoretical enterprise rests on his efforts to create a scientific explanation of unconscious phenomena and to find the means of translating into conscious awareness the repressed material that created gaps in his patient's psychic life. Freud committed himself to creating theoretical models to comprehend the phenomena of accessing unconscious processes by the mediation of spoken words. In On Aphasia he created a model that remained the foundation of all his later efforts to understand the interdigitation between unconscious and conscious processes. Freud's theories built upon the core ideas presented in On Aphasia. He used new concepts to expand and elaborate the dialectic between representations and words while two key concepts organized the entire theoretical edifice: representational gaps create pathology; verbal translation of the repressed material restores the integrity of the ego in the process of articulating personal meaningful words about what could not be affectively tolerated before the treatment.
