The author compares Freud’s and Lorenzer’s conceptualisations of the relationship between language, consciousness and the unconscious. Freud and Lorenzer are like-minded in grounding consciousness in the addition of words to representations, characterising unconscious representations as having lost the linguistic signs originally belonging to them, and in their view that these unconscious representations re-appear in consciousness under false names. Among other issues, however, in answering the questions of how linguistic signs and representations are linked with each other and why the unconscious representations re-appear in consciousness, they differ in their understandings of symbols. They also differ with regard to the relation between the biological and social nature of humankind.