ABSTRACT
The ability of schizophrenic patients to manage feelings within the psychological sphere of representations is frequently exhausted and these patients then resort to psychological methods of dealing with their thoughts and feelings in primitive and pathological modes that reach beyond the sphere of psychological representation. It is these psychological modes, to be referred to as types of actualization of warded off emotional content. The sphere of psychological representations is made up of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, memories, perceptions, and so forth, often in diffuse, inchoate, and archaic forms. There are important consequences of the distinctions between shifts within the representational sphere and changes involving actualization beyond the sphere of psychological representation. Many psychoanalytic concepts have been defined exclusively in terms of changes within the representational sphere and, as a result, fail to include facets of the phenomena they address that lie beyond that sphere.
