You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In several places in his early work, Freud expressed the opinion that there was no censorship between the unconscious and preconscious of the child. He finally abandoned
this view in 1915. We are aware that this concept has been outmoded for a long time, but there are consequences for our understanding of the child. With the introduction of the structural hypotheses, interest was displaced to the ego. Freud's problem persisted, but the question shifted, with emphasis now on the appropriate time to speak of the "ego." One now studies cognitive functions rather than the preconscious. However, Diatkine suggests it is perhaps as difficult to say anything about the cognitive functions of a child as it is to speak of its preconscious. There are, however, recognizable situations in which one may speak of the preconscious of a child, in situations which are observable pretty much in all children. Diatkine discusses several clinical examples in which he feels the preconscious of the child is in evidence, as in the "mirror image," the use of psychodrama, and Winnicott's Piggle.