ABSTRACT
The notions of figurability and the work of figurability presented themselves to us progressively during our experience of treating unrepresented or insufficiently represented mental states, beginning with the treatment of young children who were considered in France as pre-psychotic. This experience afforded us a better understanding of borderline adult patients and psychosomatic structures. Then, we understood that in every analysis, even in clearly psychoneurotic and oedipal structures one also encounters—provided the treatment is taken far enough—the problematic of a core of mental states without representation, albeit hidden behind the network of representations (see Botella & Botella, 2005).
