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The discovery of the dynamic character of the unconscious, and the realization that most of the psychic processes usually observed in consciousness could be found also to exist preconsciously, led Freud to rely but little upon the presence or absence of conscious awareness in mental phenomena. Indeed, the factor of consciousness or its absence is elusive and deceptive, and the delimitation of the System Cs from the System Pcs cannot always be carried out unambiguously. Thus a conception of the psychic apparatus devised so as to include consciousness among its essential elements could not prove entirely satisfactory.
To these difficulties one might perhaps attribute the fact that Freud, as Ernest Jones reports in the second volume of his biography (19), destroyed his manuscripts devoted to problems of consciousness. At any event, Freud cut through these complications by his fundamental change of the framework on which he proceeded to base the functioning of the mental apparatus. We know that the introduction of the structural approach to psychic phenomena became tremendously fruitful for the development of psychoanalysis. We also know that it permitted an understanding and a description of our technical procedure which before would have been impossible. The concept of the ego, in particular, had the advantage of encompassing conscious as well as preconscious and unconscious phenomena, and of uniting them within a common functional organization. However, it did not dispose of the existence of conscious as opposed to preconscious and unconscious processes, and of problems related to the functional differences between them.
Freud never thought that conscious mental processes should be considered mere epiphenomena of unconscious and preconscious ones (12), and he never relinquished his interest in problems connected with them. In his posthumous Outline of Psychoanalysis(16) he wrote: 'Conscious processes on the (perceptual) periphery of the ego2 and everything els