Representation occupies a contested and multi-layered position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a neurological mechanism, a semiotic event, a literary-aesthetic category, and a phenomenological problem. Damasio furnishes the most systematic neurobiological account, distinguishing dispositional representations — latent synaptic formulae that trigger momentary reconstructions in early sensory cortices — from the topographically organized images they generate; he insists that the body is the original and primary referent of representational activity, antecedent to any cognitive or linguistic encoding. Craig extends this somatic logic into interoception, arguing that re-representation of cortical interoceptive activity underlies subjective feeling itself. Merleau-Ponty resists cognitivist readings entirely, insisting that bodily space is not ‘space thought of or represented’ but lived motor intentionality — a position that reframes representation as a secondary, potentially distorting abstraction imposed upon pre-reflective being-in-the-world. Derrida interrogates the metaphysical scaffolding of the concept, exposing how sign-theory construes representation as a progression toward truth it structurally cannot reach. Auerbach, working across the history of Western literature, treats representation as the formal and ethical problem of rendering reality in language, tracing how style, social milieu, and historical consciousness jointly determine what can be represented and how. These tensions — neurological reconstruction versus phenomenological immediacy, literary mimesis versus semiotic deferral — give the term its enduring theoretical charge.