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Given the multiplicity of psychoanalytic theories and systems of thought, it is not surprising that a wide variety of conceptions of such a key notion as the unconscious can be discerned today. These extend from the classical definition of the unconscious as the locus of repressed instinctual representatives to dissociated, unformulated self-states. The neurosciences and the cognitive sciences too, as well as developmental research, have contributed significantly to a modification of our view of the unconscious.
Any consideration of our own theoretical thinking inevitably reveals the presence of implicit theories, which every psychoanalyst has developed, and applies, in his8 clinical work. These often diverge appreciably from the publicly professed and published theories (Canestri et al., 2006; Sandler, 1983; Tuckett, 2008). In an analyst's mind, theories are much less elaborately formulated, and available in less self-contained form, than in their published versions. An analyst may therefore integrate diverse concepts from various preferred authors and schools into a theoretical system of reference that includes personal elements and is consistent with both his scientific and his personal pre-scientific convictions. In this way, he accumulates in the course of time a body of implicit clinical knowledge that possesses a high degree of complexity and cannot be represented directly in words.
I. should like to describe implicit theoretical thinking about the unconscious on the basis of spatial conceptions. In any self-reflective questioning of one's theoretical ideas, one cannot fail to encounter the element of metaphor. This applies particularly to an abstract theoretical notion such as that of the unconscious, which can always only be inferred, but never apprehended directly by an empirical approach. The traditional, classical, conceptual edifice is a spatial one (Reed, 2003). Although we know that this geography of the mind is metaphorical, it nevertheless influences