The early development of Freud´s concept of representation in his meta-psychological theory is reexamined. The relationship between representation and sensorial stimulation received in the nervous system and conceived in a more and more indirect way throughout the first stage of psychoanalytic theory is also discussed. First, the formulation of the representation concept in On the conception of aphasia (1891) will be focused, followed by the further development of this concept in the Project for a psychology, written in 1895. The last part of current analysis will discuss how the problem of the relationship between stimuli and representation is presented in the letter to Fliess, known as "Letter 52" (12/6/1896), in which the first model of Freud's psychic apparatus begins to take shape.
Freud; metapsychology; representation