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This question, the real leitmotiv of this congress, requires some clarification. First, we could refer to the existence of one or several unconsciouses that could be situated as ‘objects’ of study in the psychic apparatus or, alternatively, we could see it as the existence of one or several concepts of ‘unconscious’ formulated by different psychoanalytic theories.
The author's paper falls within the second approach. Even though ‘the unconscious’ is nearly universally accepted as the foundational discovery of psychoanalysis and all authors ‘take it for granted’ in diverse post-Freudian theorizations, a close look actually reveals the existence of several concepts of ‘unconscious’ that they assume which not only do not coincide but are sometimes incompatible and mutually exclusive. Is the same concept of ‘unconscious’ used by Freudians and Kleinians, by ego psychology, self psychology, intersubjectivists and followers of Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, Meltzer, Laplanche or Green, for example?
Needless to say, this author does not think so. Each author and especially each school gradually introduces semantic variants into the concept of unconscious in order to adapt it to their needs of consistency and thus delineate a growingly disperse spectrum of meanings.
The author considers that the person most responsible for this ‘multivocal character’ of the unconscious is Freud himself. Until 1915 he held to the conception of the ‘systemic’ unconscious, that is to say, a system ‘beneath’ the preconscious system, separated by the barrier of repression and seat of the primary process in which neither denial, logic, causality nor temporality operate. This is the concept of ‘unconscious’ of his first topic.