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The Freudian unconscious is a particularly topical subject now that a concept of the unconscious is so much used in many disciplines that it is in danger of being diluted into a catch-all term undermining the specific nature of a concept still alive and well in contemporary psychoanalysis. This was certainly the theme of the conference organized in November 2008 by the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, known as the President's Conference, from which all the papers have been collected in this extensive and important monograph. The first point to mention here is the rich variety of subjects addressed, listed under different chapters, making this book a comprehensive overview of Freud's concept of the unconscious. However, it is also the quality of each paper that makes this monograph a key reference work on the modernity of this concept.
The book is made easily accessible by the division into clearly differentiated themes that immediately open up the problematic of exactly what makes it specific from the perspective of other disciplines. A concept of the unconscious does not belong solely to the psychoanalytic domain but in fact covers several epistemological fields ranging from philosophy to current cognitive neurosciences. The papers by various authors therefore emphasize the complexity of this concept by demonstrating its evolution within Freud's thought itself. It is also important to indicate here the strong interest taken by some psychoanalysts in Freud's metapsychological revisions between 1914 and 1923, which introduced the problematic of narcissism, the definition of the second topography (ego, id, superego) and the new drive dualism with the life drive and the death drive, because these involve ‘an unconscious beyond sexual repression’ that overturns the early definitions. The notion of an ego that has partly become unconscious in terms of its inherent resistances brings about a topography of the unconscious that demarcates more uncertain areas requiring more c