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The [[notion ]] of ideational [[representation ]] was proposed by Piera Aulagnier. She distinguished [[three ]] levels of representation: the pictogram, the [[fantasy]], and the [[idea]]. Involved here are the three modes (representable, figurable, thinkable) through which the [[psyche ]] metabolizes the information it draws from its [[encounter ]] with [[reality]]. These three modes coexist, according to Aulagnier in The [[Violence ]] of [[Interpretation]]: From Pictogram to [[Statement ]] (1975/2001): "Every act, every [[experience]], gives rise conjointly to a pictogram, to a representation and to '[[sense]]-making"' (p. xxx). The ideational representation is thus at the basis of the thinkable, which can be defined as a relational [[schema ]] that the I imposes on the elements of both its own [[internal ]] reality and the [[outside ]] [[world ]] in [[order ]] to make [[them ]] conform and cohere with the [[logic ]] of the [[discourse ]] from which the I itself is produced.

What distinguishes the ideational representation from the pictogram and the fantasy is the [[appearance ]] on the [[mental ]] [[stage ]] of the [[word]]-presentation and the changes it will impose. On this point Aulagnier's [[theory ]] converges with that of Sigmund [[Freud]], for whom an idea becomes [[conscious ]] in conjunction with the appearance of the [[word-presentation]]. As he stated in "The [[Unconscious]]" (1915): "[T]he conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the [[thing ]] plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of [[the thing ]] alone" (p. 201). Aulagnier emphasized the importance of the [[dimension ]] of what is heard for the mental inscription of [[word-presentations ]] in The Violence of Interpretation, recalling Ernest Cassirer's description of "the [[infant]]'s first encounters with [[language ]] as a series of sound fragments, attributes of a [[breast ]] that he endows with the [[power ]] of [[speech]]" (p. 55). There is then an adjunct of this "heard" to the [[thing-presentation]], but this is still within the primary [[system]], for the system of [[signification ]] remains organized based on the postulate of the omnipotence of the [[desire ]] of the [[Other]]. There is thus a first step in the infant's [[psychic ]] [[activity ]] during language acquisition, in which [[libidinal ]] [[meaning ]] has priority over [[linguistic ]] meaning. Nevertheless, according to Aulagnier, this libidinal meaning traces an access to linguistic signification "by leading the psyche to accept that this meaning [[exists]], that it is part of the [[representative]]'s inheritance and that this meaning is not unconnected to the offer or [[refusal ]] [[present ]] in the psyche's response" (p. 65).

Alongside this, the infant's [[thinking ]] activity and thus the [[formation ]] of ideational representations and language acquisition are part of what the [[mother ]] expects for the [[child]]; at the same [[time ]] these elements are also what will enable to child to gain its independence by keeping its [[thoughts ]] [[secret]]. In contrast, if thinking is attacked by [[psychosis ]] such secrecy is [[impossible]]. Aulagnier did not situate this attack, as Freud did in "The Unconscious," in [[terms ]] of a [[regressive ]] [[treatment ]] of word as thing, or of [[metaphor ]] as [[concrete ]] [[object ]] (as Harold Searles did in "The Differentiation between Concrete and [[Metaphorical ]] Thinking in the Recovering [[Schizophrenic ]] [[Patient ]] " [1962]) but instead on the basis of the fact that thinking, which constitutes the equivalent of an [[erogenous zone]]-function, can become the object of mutilations or amputations, depending on the relational field in which it develops.