Dellanoce, Filippo

Returning to Freudian images and the representability of the hysterical attack - 2024.


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In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud distinguishes three types of mental images: ideas/representations, or Vorstellungen; figures, or Darstellungen; and images of a hallucinatory nature, or Bilder, that make up the manifest dream. The function of figurability or expression in visual form is to transform ideas into images. Since, according to Freud, the dream-work is the paradigm of the process of forming hysterical symptoms, we should expect to find three types of images and the function of transformation in this case too. According to Freud, hysteria is in fact a disorder of sexual representations or fantasies that are expressed in theatrical or pantomime form during the hysterical attack. The function of figurability gives way to the psychic function of conversion (Konversion), permitting the transition from the representational register to the register of the somatic visibility of the attack.