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That there are certain kinds of ideas that are inaccessible to conscious thought is a fundamental assumption of psychoanalysis. This restriction is due in part to the content of the unconscious material. The defenses of censorship refuse the emergence of ideas that are deemed unacceptable, but perhaps more important, while they carry the name of ideas or presentations1 they cannot be said to be ideational or representative in any manner in which those terms carry meaning within consciousness. For unconscious ideation, if so it can be called, obeys none of the fundamental characteristics of conscious thought; non-contradiction, causation, temporality.2 This indicates that what is barred from consciousness is not merely material that the super-ego deems impermissible, but rather that there is a form of psychic activity that is simply unthinkable for consciousness. This is not due to the content's sexual and transgressive nature but rather that it contradicts the very form in which thought must be given to be represented within the psyche as an idea or representation.
Yet if this is to be taken at its word, would not the unfeasibility of knowledge of the form of unconscious thinking mean that any description of its workings would be impossible? Freud attends to this problem by acknowledging this impossibility of any direct knowledge of the unconscious while insisting that indirect knowledge can be attained, for example, through the analysis of dreams, parapraxis, etc. He writes:
How do we arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious. It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation of translation into something conscious. Psycho-analytic work shows us every day that translation of this kind is possible. (1915/1957, p. 166)