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A peculiar urgency characterized the writing of Freud's 1915-1917 metapsychological papers. Not least among his several motives was his belief in the need for a synthesis of his work, since he feared that the end of his life was near. Böhme
discusses philosophical and methodological aspects of Freud's all-important paper on the unconscious, a paper in which Freud essentially expounds his first theory of the psyche, also called the first topographical theory to distinguish it from the structural theory introduced in 1923 in The Ego and the Id.
Freud's paper began with epistemological and scientific justifications for introducing the concept of the unconscious, stressing that it is a psychic unconscious. On the one hand, all neurophysiological and somatic speculations were held in abeyance, which permitted Freud to develop his metapsychology in its topical, dynamic, and structural aspects within a purely psychological field. On the other hand, Freud was concerned to defend his concept of the unconscious against philosophical objections which would equate "conscious" with "mental." Freud justified the introduction of the notion of the unconscious as a necessary hypothesis to explain the continuity of mental life.
Böhme considers Freud's references to Kant's unknowable thing-in-itself in attempting to make his concept plausible and acceptable. This appeal to Kant has been criticized both for trivializing Kant's thought, and for endangering psychoanalytic theory by rendering the unconscious essentially unknowable. However, the author feels that the Kantian notion can help clarify Freud's concept of the unconscious. The main criticism is that the thing-in-itself cannot be an appearance and cannot participate in a causal series, while Freud had explicitly introduced the unconscious to do precisely that. This objection is correct insofar as it goes, but Kant made it clear that we can only think of the thing-in-itself but cannot know it because it is not a given. B