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In «Remembering, repeating and working-through» Freud (1914, 149) postulates the existence of psychical processes that are inaccessible to consciousness not because they have been repressed or decathected, but because they were «never at any time noticed». They may appear in analytic treatment in dreams or be repeated in the form of action. Analysis may transform these unthought internal experiences - unconscious somato-psychic referents located outside and beyond the symbolic realm although situated at its origins (Riolo, 2008) - into representations endowed with meaning, thereby removing them from the circuit of repetition. That is the sense in which therapy may constitute the «accomplishment of a psychical act which did not take place at the time» (Freud, 1895, 300), by imparting conscious representation to psychical contents that could not become conscious because they were never formulated, and therefore «merely had a possibility of existing» (Freud, 1895).
Freud draws attention on various occasions (1913; 1915; 1921) to the possibility of communications from unconscious to unconscious that take place outside consciousness and dispense with the instrument of words. The analyst becomes aware of them through derivatives of the unconscious: «ideas that come into our head we do not know from where, and […] intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how» (Freud, 1915, 165f.).
The analyst's acceptance of the unconscious communication and its transformation - by countertransference work (Russo, 1998; 2003) - into a representation that can be communicated may confer a possibility of psychic existence on these internal experiences that were never formulated and are therefore neither truly conscious nor truly unconscious (Riolo, 2010), thus so to speak extracting them from limbo.