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Psychoanalysis, from its beginnings in Studies on Hysteria, has been defined by its preoccupation with what is not known (Breuer and Freud 1895). Our central premise is that the unknown causes the illnesses that we treat; the idea defines both our theory and our praxis. And if un-awareness is the disease, it follows that knowing is the cure.
Analysts working within different psychoanalytic traditions have long disagreed about just what it is that eludes awareness, and within each tradition ideas about this have changed over time. Freud's original focus was on lived experiences that he defined as traumatic; these could be interpersonal events that were too disturbing to be integrated into our personal narrative, or they could be thoughts that were too discrepant with our sense of who we believe we are or who we think we ought to be. Later he turned his attention exclusively to the life of the mind, insisting that cure depended on the recollection of the ubiquitous but repressed fantasies of childhood. Still later, he noticed that the ways in which we avoid knowing ourselves elude awareness; the analysis of defense became a primary target of investigation. And, as alternative theories emerged and captured the imagination of groups of analysts, other ideas about what must be known came to occupy center stage.
Despite these changes—and despite the conceptual disputes to which the alternative models gave rise—this way of putting things suggests a continuity that has characterized psychoanalysis over the 120