Thing-Presentation

In many of Freud's writings, "thing-presentation" means solely what it means for empiricist psychology, as his concept of the mnemic image or trace would suggest. In his paper "The Unconscious" (1915e), however, Freud defined "thing-presentation" as "the cathexis, if not of the memory-images of the thing, at least of remoter memory-traces derived from these" (p. 201). This definition refers to the theory that Freud had worked out on the contrast between perception and memory and on the sequence of mnemic systems. The psychic apparatus,...