The concepts of present unconscious and past unconscious have been introduced in order to provide a useful theoretical schema for comprehending clinical psychoanalytic material. In the present paper these concepts, together with the notion of the second censorship, are made use of to provide a framework for understanding the way in which guilt feelings and the ideas associated with them are dealt with at different levels of consciousness. The technical approach linked with the theoretical ideas in this paper is described, with special reference to the relation between interpretation of the present and reconstruction of the past.