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This paper was originally in Spanish. It was read in Spanish at the First Latin-American Psycho-Analytic Congress in Buenos Aires, August 1956. The English version is from 1959, published by the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40: 1–5.
The discovery of the characteristics of the system Ucs is the most creative and fundamental of Freud’s discoveries because it is on these characteristics that his greatest contributions to psychology, especially all those pertaining to dreams, are based. We have indirect evidence that he valued them particularly. In his preface (1, p. xxxii) to the third English edition of The Interpretation of Dreams he mentions that ‘it contains, even according to my present-day judgment, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime’.
On the other hand we know from Jones (4, p. 34) that there were in Freud’s writings three things of which he thought highly; one was the last chapter of this book, another his essay on ‘The Unconscious’. Now both these rest, so to speak, on the foundations given by the characteristics of the system Ucs, and in both the study of these characteristics occupies a
prominent place. Finally, in his New Introductory Lectures (3, p. 99) he comments: ‘It is constantly being borne in upon me that we have made far too little use for our theory of the indubitable fact that the repressed remains unaltered by the passage of time. This seems to offer us the possibility of an approach to some really profound truths. But I myself have made no further progress here’. This reference to one of the characteristics is worded in a manner that leaves no doubt as to his estimate of its importance. It is obvious that what he says about this particular one could be applied to all. Yet recent analytic researches are, on the whole, sadly uninterested in this fundamental topic.
It is worth remarking