On Freud's The Unconscious

If there ever was one word that could represent the essence of Freud's work, that word would be 'unconscious'. Indeed, Freud himself regarded his 1915 paper 'The Unconscious' as central to clarifying the fundamentals of his metapsychology. The paper delineates the topographic model of the mind and spells out the concepts of primary and secondary process thinking, thing and word presentations, timelessness of the unconscious, condensation and symbolism, unconscious problem solving, and the relationship between the system Ucs and repression. Examining these proposals in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as from the perspective of current neurophysiology and ethology, nine distinguished analysts take Freud's ideas further in ways that have implications for both psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Contemporary Freud , Introduction , “The unconscious” (1915e) , Editor’s Note , Discussion of “The unconscious” , Metapsychology and clinical practice: lessons from Freud’s “The unconscious” , “The unconscious” in psychoanalysis and neuropsychology , Freud’s “The unconscious”: can this work be squared with a biological account? , A Hindu reading of Freud’s “The unconscious” , The repressed maternal in Freud’s topography of mind , Complementary models of the mind in Freud’s “The unconscious”? , The unconscious in work with psychosomatic patients 1 , The unconscious and perceptions of the self , “In spite of my ego”: problem solving and the unconscious 1 , Epilogue

Salman Akhtar