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There is a sense in which all of Freud's theorizing about mind is an attempt to make sense of a simple but powerful fact: There are states of mind in which the features that characterize a person's normal, conscious, and self-centered mentality are absent, yet somehow these other states of mind are a part of that person and are involved in the person's actions, thoughts, and of course psychopathology. The successive formulations of Freud's theories, from the pretopographical through the neuropsychological Project and the topographical to the structural, each attempt to articulate this fact in a conceptually coherent form, compatible with the clinical data, other psychological theories, and the materialist metatheory with which Freud operated. Through these successive formulations it is the conscious/unconscious distinction in its various forms—descriptive, systematic, but especially dynamic—which bears the main theoretical load.
Despite its importance, Freud never felt that he gave an account of the relation of the conscious to the unconscious which was complete and satisfied his metatheoretical criteria for psychological theory: That it be bio-evolutionarily justifiable, conceptually coherent, and in accord with the clinical data. And the reconceptualizations of this relation which psychoanalysts have attempted ever since show that others have not been satisfied with the matter either.
Patricia Herzog's book is a critical examination of the way in which Freud presented the conscious/unconscious distinction. She moves all the way from the early, pretopographical theory of defense given in “The Neuro-Psychoses