There are three theories of representation: the reflective, the intentional and the constructionist approaches. The constructionist approach further has the semiotic approach and the discursive approach. With reflective approach to representation, language is said to function like a mirror; it reflects the true meaning of an object, person, idea or event as it already exists in the world.
Mass media produces and reproduces stereotypes of cultural groups within a country, as well as the view of people from other cultures. The media can manipulate, influence, persuade and pressurise society, along with even controlling the world at times in both positive and negative ways; mentally, physically and emotionally.
Controversial stories are reported and printed with no reliance of it being fact or not. Mass communication influences both society and culture. Different forms of communication, including messages in the mass media, give shape and structure to society. Additionally, mass media outlets can spread cultural knowledge and artistic works around the globe. The backbone of any democracy is an independent, professional and responsible media. Their role is to inform, criticise and stimulate debate.
The four functions of mass communications are: surveillance, correlation, cultural transmission and entertainment. I have on many occasions made the point that a free media is an important part of a functioning society — it can help free flow of information and ideas, to educate its audience, to hold those in power to account in areas such as exposing corruption scandals.
This leads to the potential for different readings of texts as representations are questioned and reinterpreted. Students need to be aware of the range of choices available to them in representing people, objects, experiences and ideas as well as how cultural convention may put limits on representation, so positioning them to respond to the world in particular ways.
Students understand that in representing the world composers and responders construct, co-construct, deconstruct and reconstruct meaning in and through texts. Students understand that representations are varied and reflect individual experiences and contexts.
Students understand that there may be different representations of the same objects, events, people, emotions and ideas. Students understand that aspects of the real world and of their imagination may be represented in different modes and media.
Skip to main content. Representation What it is Representation is the depiction of a thing, person or idea in written, visual, performed or spoken language. Analytical work on representations has as its principal aim the transformation of image-based representations, linked to highly intense affects, into word-presentations Golse and Roussillon, , thereby enabling the associated excitations affects, emotions to be bound.
These image-based representations are revealed involuntarily by the analysand through his or her free associations or dream-content Freud, ; Bollas, In addition to working on the analysand's free associations, an important part of working-through is done via the analysis of representations, actualized in the transference relationship, of earlier relationship patterns Levine, ; these can be analyzed thanks to the neutrality of the analyst who, in addition, agrees to be the target of these transference-based re-actualizations.
An important part of the analyst's work lies in trying to help the patient rediscover the links between representations and affects Golse and Roussillon, From the point of view of CBT, one of the main origins of psychological suffering lies in the avoidance of emotional experiences Barlow et al.
Since the person involved is afraid that a given emotional experience may prove too threatening and aversive, he or she will attempt to suppress or avoid it. However, since every emotion is an internal experience, it cannot be avoided.
Attempts to suppress or avoid it encourage the activation of automatic schematic processes which maintain and exacerbate the person's emotional state. For the past 15 or so years Hayes, , CBT has come to understand the importance of subtle avoidance techniques with respect to emotions — they may turn out to be a crucial factor in psychopathology.
This kind of avoidance does not consist in avoiding or suppressing all information concerning the emotional problem that is being encountered; it aims at avoiding specifically anything that could possibly evoke an emotional response.
The person concerned will think about the problem to the point of brooding over it — but in an over-generalizing and abstract manner rather than in a specific and concrete way, making use of verbal rather than image-based processes from the point of view of a spectator rather than as an agent, focusing on the past and the future rather than on the present moment. From that point of view, the work of psychotherapy consists in becoming conscious of the emotional experience and exploring it in an experiential way in the given problem situation Philippot, b.
The person is encouraged not only to face up to situations that he or she fears and therefore avoids but also — and above all — to feel and explore the emotions that these situations evoke. During these emotional exposures, the individual is encouraged to adopt an experiential approach based on what he or she actually feels rather than an analytical one based on the analysis of the reasons for and consequences of his or her state.
By encouraging the person to focus on his or her direct experience of a given situation, CBT differs significantly from the psychoanalytical approach, with its emphasis on verbalization and interpretation. Edelman has suggested that souvenirs do not correspond to concrete fixed traces but to the souvenir of neuronal pathways linked to the experience of a given event. In learning theory e. Currently, learning theory also maintains that once such a link is set up, it is not easy to undo it Bouton, There is therefore some degree of convergence between these two approaches as regards the link between representations and affects.
In the early stages of cognitive theory, particularly in Lang's bio-informational theory, mental distress was thought of as being related to some pathological emotional representation or other. That representation included the elements that triggered the emotion stimuli and the emotional responses to these.
This would later become more complex, with the inclusion within the representation of the meaning that is attributed to the relevant emotion. The pathological nature of the association comes from the inflexibility of the structure of relationships between the elements of the representation a stimulus automatically leads to a particular response or activates a given meaning and from its unrealistic and dysfunctional aspect. Traumatic events cannot be assimilated if they are too far removed from pre-existing structures of representation.
Since the structures that process emotional information are the organizers of the self, there will be repeated attempts at processing traumatic emotional information with the aim of assimilating these elements. Once they are assimilated, the information will be less easy to reactivate, because it no longer represents a challenge to the self. That description is similar to the picture that Freud himself painted in his portrayal of traumatic neuroses, highlighting the unsuccessful and repeated attempts at binding when the too-fragile ego has been overwhelmed by a traumatic event.
Freud [] emphasized the fact that psychical trauma have a damaging effect. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety , he showed how the ego can also be overwhelmed by drive-related impulses that have the effect of a psychical trauma. Both of these mechanisms may give rise to symptom-formations. They argue that integration is an automatic process which reinforces the internal structure of the representation. A well-integrated representation, the internal cohesion of which is solid, will easily be activated by an encounter, in the environment, with stimuli that contain some of its aspects.
Processing or working-through is more complex and non-automatic; it enables the creation of associations between several representations in the cognitive network. That associative network is activated during tasks in which the individual has to search his or her memory actively for certain elements; environmental stimuli do not activate it to the same extent. The cognitive approach describes several kinds of processing emotional information when working-through proves impossible when the information cannot be assimilated within the associative network.
According to Barlow and Allen , avoidance is the main force behind any aggravation of emotional distress. In addition, both avoidance and suppression of primary emotions come at a price — cognitive, affect-based, and behavioral. They bring about disorders of attention, of memory or of executive functions, often create an overall sense of dysphoria, and, in behavioral terms, tend to limit the individual's sphere of activity.
Hence the importance of the work of processing primary emotions. In this approach, there are two highly subtle mechanisms for avoiding emotions: the development of abstract generalized thinking, with little in the way of images concerning the event that is being avoided, and mental ruminating. Both of these give the illusion of an attempt at processing the relevant thoughts. In therapy, the cognitive-behavioral approach attempts to process primary emotional information and more particularly, in order to limit recourse to over-generalization, to make specific the emotional perceptions and representations involved.
In both approaches, representations play a major role in defining an experience and preforming perceptions. In both also, the failure to process adequately a memory that cannot be represented is pathogenic. In a more or less explicit manner, they maintain that the relationship between representations or between representations and affects is set up through a process of associations.
In addition, they are in agreement when it comes to the part played by conscious and unconscious processes. They agree also that difficulties which arise in the processing of some representations have to do with the fact that these cannot be assimilated or embodied within the set of representations that the individual has of the self or of the world.
For CBT, the avoided emotional material or the mental effort deployed to maintain the avoidance of primary emotions will have similar consequences. As regards therapy, both approaches argue in favor of attempting to process the original information while acknowledging that that processing in itself may not be enough to free the individual from the traces left by the emotions, the learning situation or even the system of representations.
They differ firstly in their interpretation of the relationship between conscious and unconscious processes. For psychoanalysis, there is a separation between conscious and unconscious representations. Therefore an active process of repression lies at the heart of failures in working-through. On the other hand, cognitive approaches do not imply such an active process. They rather take into account the fact that pathogenic emotions are often automatic and implicit by nature and are difficult to regulate.
Another difference between the two approaches has to do with the nature of the relationship between affect and representation. For the cognitive approach, affects and representations, whether conscious or unconscious, are linked together.
For psychoanalysis, on the other hand, affects can move from one representation to another. That idea, specific to psychoanalytical theory, entails some important clinical consequences. Displacement of an affect implies that the meaning attributed to it by the analysand i. It should also be pointed out that the psychoanalytical approach sets great store by verbalization. Putting words on these images facilitates conscious representation which, in turn, binds excitation. In the cognitive-behavioral approach, the aim of the treatment was initially to modify representations by introducing new information incompatible with any pathological representation Lang, At present, the work now being carried out in this field Linehan, ; Hayes, ; Barlow et al.
Another important element of this approach consists in dealing with schematic aspects and in becoming aware of the bodily reactions associated with these. In exposure therapy, for example, CBT practitioners agree that it is important that there be a real exposure to the emotions that arise in emotional situations while looking out for the sometimes very subtle mechanisms by which emotions are avoided.
In particular, it is essential that the person in treatment does not simply evoke the situation in which a given emotion arises without actually activating that emotion itself. In CBT, the tendency to over-generalize emotions is looked upon as a strategy for avoiding them. When people talk in very general or abstract terms, they are attempting to avoid painful emotions. Another important difference between the two approaches lies in how they consider the thematic aspects of representations.
In psychoanalysis, unconscious representations are structured in accordance with universal patterns, in particular the Oedipus complex. Only the resolution of these patterns is specific to each individual. Therefore, the themes found in unconscious representations are identical for everybody, whatever the particular experiences that each individual has.
On the other hand, in the cognitive-behavioral approach, the themes encountered in representations are entirely idiosyncratic. They depend on each person's own experiences, as well as on his or her innate features and temperament. Obviously enough, in any given society, human beings will often share similar experiences, hence the fact that there may well be resemblances in some thematic aspects of their representations.
These, however, are not universal; they always depend on the very concrete and personal experiences that each individual has gone through. There is also a difference between the two approaches as to the way in which they envisage the activation of representations during the therapeutic process. In CBT, the clinical hypothesis is that the activation optimal, not maximal of information relating to an underlying schema leads to a re-experiencing of the emotions involved.
The therapist has a collaborative relationship with the person being treated and suggests certain exploratory experiences that the latter can adjust to his or her capacities and motivation. In psychoanalysis, optimal activation is decided upon by the patient him- or herself. Enough space is given so that patients can take up different themes at their own rhythm speaking freely, following particular lines of thought, free associations, the unfolding of the transference ; this enables the patient to regulate how and when representations evocative of painful emotions are explored this is one reason why psychoanalytical treatment takes so long.
There are significant differences between the psychoanalytical and the cognitive-behavioral approach. In particular, there is a wide gap between the conditions under which theories are constructed in these two approaches. Psychoanalytical metapsychology is based on observations made by clinical practitioners. The cognitive-behavioral approach is based on empirical experimentation, which plays no part in psychoanalysis.
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