Chapter I: The Unconscious and Its Forms of Expression

The foundation on which the whole of psychoanalysis rests is the theory of the unconscious. By this, however, is not to be understood a term derived from abstract thought nor merely an hypothesis created with the aim of establishing a philosophic system; with the significance, for example, which Eduard von Hartmann has given the word, psychoanalysis possesses no connection at all. The negative peculiarity of the phenomenon appearing in the term, namely, the absence of the quality of consciousness, is indeed the most essential and most characteristic one, but not, however, the only one. We are already familiar with a whole series of positive distinguishing features which differentiate the unconscious psychic material from the rest, the conscious and foreconscious.

An idea which at a given moment belongs to the content of consciousness of an individual, can in the next moment have disappeared; others, emerging later, have appeared in its place. Nevertheless, the idea still retains a permanent relation to conscious mental life, for it can be brought back again by some kind of connected association chain without the necessity of a new sense perception; that is to say, in the interim, the idea was removed from conscious mental life but still remained accessible to the mental processes. Such ideas, which indeed lack the quality of consciousness, the latter being every time recoverable, however, we call the fore-conscious and distinguish this most explicitly from the real unconscious.

The real unconscious ideas are not, like the foreconscious ideas, temporarily separated from conscious mental life, but are permanently excluded from it; the power to reënter consciousness, or stated more exactly, the normal waking consciousness of the subject, these ideas lack completely. As the state of consciousness changes, so also does its condition of receptivity. After such transformations as are brought about, for example, by the condition known to neurologists as “condition seconde” an