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In his 1915 essay “On the Unconscious”, Freud, among other things, was working to articulate the structural relationship between the systems conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, and to delineate the mechanisms through which one system became porous to the other with respect to content. It was in that paper that he first distinguished between thing-presentations, which he described as unmediated, visually encoded cathexes of memory traces, and word-presentations, which he understood as linking the very sound wave of a word to the cathexis of a memory trace, that is, to a thing-presentation. Thing-presentations are, therefore, a matter of the system unconscious whereas word-presentations concern the system preconscious-conscious: “[t]he conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone” (1915/1957, p. 201).
Freud's central preoccupation with accounting for how material travels from one psychic register to another led him to wonder about what process an unconscious trace must undergo as it migrates to the territory of consciousness. His primary question was as follows: when an unconscious inscription becomes conscious, does the material that was originally outside consciousness endure a change of state (what came to be known as the functional hypothesis) or does it achieve a second inscription (which has come to be referred to as the topographical hypothesis) upon reaching its destination? The implication of the topographical explication is that a second inscription would imply that the same psychic event is now inscribed twice: once in its original iteration as thing-presentation, as well as a newly installed one which pairs it with a word so that it may live in conscious life.
Lacan approached this question by insisting on the durable presence of the original unconscious inscription. Though the original trace is never at the sub