In the Freudian model, word-presentations correspond to verbal language, and thing-presentations correspond to visual images. They differ as signifier differs from signified. In Freud's view, although unconscious thing-presentations and thought antedate word-presentations, which are preconscious-conscious, he assigned a special role to verbal language in the mechanism whereby unconscious processes became conscious.

In the associationist perspective of his prepsychoanalytic work, in particular, in On Aphasia (1891b), where Freud first presented the antithesis between thing- and word-presentations, the thing-presentation constituted an open complex of images, whereas the word-presentation was a closed entity whose special task was to gather the "associations of the object" together as the "complex" that constituted the object's identity. What Freud was apparently referring to here was less the presence of...