The Unconscious: Seemingly Gone Missing and Yet it Represses

It seems a total paradox, almost incomprehensible, and yet it is true: among psychoanalysts, attention to the unconscious is diminishing — that is to say, to the peculiar and specific object of our activity. In reality, it is not so much the open and repeated affirmation of its existence that keeps us in contact with its territory, as much as it is rather the patient and discrete allusions to the unconscious when one passes close to it. Semi's (2007) comments on the vague indistinction between the unconscious and the conscious are on the whole laudable. It is also true that there have been no advances toward a greater clarification, a deepening of the connection between the early Freudian formulations of the system Conscious/Unconscious and the later ones of ego-id-superego. As Riolo (1999) noted, attention has shifted from latent contents to manifest contents in the reading of dreams, free associations, and the patient's communications, in an intense exercise of hermeneuticization of inter-subjective productions. The key element in organizing the psychic apparatus, that element we called and still call «unconscious representation», is often neglected. The appeal to the conscious mind, frequently practiced, is sometimes evidenced as the more meaningful perspective of future research (Imbasciati, 2005). Consciousness is of course what is most important to have at our disposal in order to live properly, but it is extremely fragile and ill-informed, as psychoanalysis itself has documented through the study of the unconscious and the clinical practice of its analysis. Such analysis is difficult and never direct, but always conducted on the derivatives of the unconscious, tangentially, in glimpses. Nevertheless, it is not loosely structured -quite the opposite. Today we make use of a very sophisticated apparatus for revealing and working on the Unconscious, of tools, theories, methods. In this sense, there has been a true development of Freudian discoveries, especially i