Psychical working over is the work of thought that links and associates mental representations among themselves and through the intermediary of language, leading to their evolution, through the successive translations and networks of symbolic associations put into operation by fantasies, from the stage of the primary processes to that of the secondary processes. It is an expression of the instinct's requirement for psychic work owing to its link with the somatic.

Sigmund Freud borrowed the term psychical working over from Jean Martin Charcot, who described a period of mental processing between the time of a trauma and the appearance of hysterical symptoms. As early as 1892, and then in the Studies on Hysteria with Josef Breuer (1895), Freud evokes a working out through association that has not been able to take place in hysteria, leading to stasis of the traumatic effect in a separate psychic group, with no...