The author explores the processes of revealing, creating and working through new meaning in mental life and relates these processes to specific methods of producing representations of emotional experience through their transformation into unconscious symbolism in the form of imagery. Drawing on several dreams and other experiences from a detailed clinical case, the author argues for the value of considering three interpenetrating levels of meaning that operate simultaneously in mental life, namely hidden meaning, absent meaning and potential meaning: 'hidden' meaning resulting from dynamic forms of repression, absent meaning from a pregnant pressure exerted on psychic life by unconscious internal objects whenever any new emotional situation confronts the ego. Absent meaning is not just waiting in the unconscious to become explicit in a unique form. It is in its very nature to remain partially absent and it can never be rendered wholly conscious. All symbolic constructions that are expressed at first by unconscious imagery found especially in dreams are attempts to capture and represent the absent meaning. The concept of potential meaning refers to experiences produced by the interpretation of absent meaning, and consists of a specific case of this latter. Potential-meaning, when interpreted, rearticulates meanings on a specific symbolic field, and opens up new experiential possibilities, thus creating new meanings that expand the possibilities for emotional development. The author's ideas draw on the formulations of Aulagnier, Bion, Ferro, Green and Khan.

We start by stressing the idea that the process itself of constructing the symbol in its different components and its vicissitudes is centrally important to contemporary psychoanalysis as symbols are essential for thinking and for storing emotional experiences in our memory and for conveying our affects to others and to ourselves. Our implicit idea is that internal attacks are not directed only at the internal objects, but also include attacks on the structure or forms of the mental representations before and while they become constituted in symbols. It is by this means that destructive impulses invade the processes of symbolic construction. Symbols can lose their plasticity and thus silence the emotions and therefore cut off the patient from their meanings. Our clinical material allows us to increase our understanding of how the formal qualities of symbols operate in mental life, and how they can interfere in the capacity to work through emotional experiences. Finally, our reflections based on the analysis of a patient with difficulty in relating with the meanings of the symbols he produced will highlight the importance of the analyst's reverie along the process of formulating an interpretation. This paper is also part of a development in the study of the process of reverie.

In this paper the author attempts to expand the idea put forward by Freud who considered dreams as a special form of unconscious thinking. It is the author's contention that the psychical working-out function performed by dreams is a form of unconscious thinking, which transforms affects into memories and mental structures. He also attempts to clarify the way in which meaning is built and transformed in mental life. In that respect the unconscious internal world is seen as a form of unconscious thinking, a private theatre where meaning is generated and transformed. He focuses on what happens to feelings in dreams in connection with the meanings as a result of and an expression of the several stages of working through. The dream world is described as the setting where the mind gives expressive pictorial representation to the emotions involved in a conflict: a first step towards thinkability. The dreamwork also constitutes a process through which meaning is apprehended, built on and transformed at an expressive non-discursive level, based on representation through figurative/pictorial images. The author draws on Meltzer's formulation to conjecture that the working-through function of dreams, mainly in response to interpretations, is performed by a process of progression in formal qualities of the representations made available by dreaming in the form he has called affective pictograms. It is through progression in formal qualities of the representation that the thinking capabilities of the affective life develop and become part of the process of what is called metaphorically the metabolisation of emotional life. This process takes place through migration of meaning across various levels of mental process. In this perspective the analyst's interpretations of dreams effect what linguists call transmutation of the symbolic basis, a process that is necessary to help the mind to improve its capacity to think. Something expressed on the evocative plane and condensed into a pictographic image is then transformed into verbal language that expresses meaning. These conceptions are illustrated by a detailed clinical case.

O autor discute o processo de constituição da subjetividade a partir de uma reflexão sobre a maneira pela qual opera o inconsciente de um ponto de vista Kleiniano-Bioniano. No trabalho são examinados alguns conceitos chaves do ponto de vista de seu significado contemporâneo: cisão, identificação projetiva, repressão, objeto parcial, transferência e posição. Finalmente, o conceito de patologia e o modo pelo qual as mudanças psíquicas ocorrem são examinados.

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