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In this monograph Freud has continued and amplified the thoughts which he first started in his 1920 paper, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” and attempts to consider in a synthetic way some of the topics which have not been adequately subjected to psychoanalytical treatment. He has divided the present subject into topics, the substance of which may be expressed as follows:
The basic assumption of psychoanalysis, which makes it possible to understand the pathological processes of the personality and to deal with them scientifically, is the differentiation of the psyche into consciousness and unconsciousness, and Freud believes that those who would refute this differentiation have never studied the phenomena of hypnosis and of the dream, or they would be forced to admit the failure of their psychology of consciousness in solving problems involving these phenomena.
Consciousness is a purely descriptive term concerned with most immediate and certain observation, while the unconscious in a descriptive sense may be divided into two parts, one of which, the “foreconscious,” is closely related to the conscious, that is, latent consciousness, but dynamically and psychically speaking there is but one unconscious, the characteristic forces of which are displacement of images and resistance.
Everything displaced is unconscious, but not everything, which is unconscious is displaced. A part of the ego is certainly unconscious, but it is not latent in the sense of foreconscious or it could not become active without becoming conscious.
In this section of the monograph the author discusses the relation