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Freud’s seminal, however – regrettably – no longer available, lecture “Some Remarks on the Unconscious” at the 7th International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Berlin in the year 1922 should be considered as a forerunner of Freud’s later substantial development toward the introduction of a structural frame of reference in The Ego and the Id (Freud 1923b, SE XIX, 12–66/RSE XIX, 10–58). For this reason, the brief but still preserved synopsis (Freud 1922f, SE XIX, 3–4/RSE XIX, 4) of Freud’s lecture deserves a commentary by way of an introduction.1
Freud developed his conception of the mind, which he termed “mental apparatus”, progressively. Although Freud himself did not bequeath a systematic theory of the mind, his theoretical assumptions in this regard could – due to their striking coherence – subsequently be subdivided into phases by David Rapaport and further specified by Joseph Sandler, Christopher Dare, and Alex Holder by identifying three phases and naming then Freud’s models of the mind, even though Freud had not formulated them as such (Rapaport 1959; Sandler, Dare, and Holder 1972a, 1972b, 1972c, and 1997; cf. Giampieri-Deutsch 2012, 2020).
According to this useful partition, in a first, still pre-analytical phase from around 1886 to 1897, Freud worked within the frame of reference of an affect-trauma model of the psychological mental apparatus or mind.
In a second phase from 1897 to 1923, Freud introduced a “topographical”, i.e. a spatial, model of the mind, in which three psychological systems are related spatially and which is organised into three psychical “localities” or systems, already familiar from The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900a): system Perception-Consciousness (Cs.) or sometimes referred to just as system Perception (Pcpt.),2 system Preconscious (Pcs.) and system Unconscious (Ucs.).