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“The Unconscious does it speak to us today?” — Yes, it does, but do we know anything about it as such? “Metapsychology, my psychology that leads behind consciousness” as Freud said (Masson, 1985, p. 301; Freud, 1950 (1892-1899), p. 274), refers to the assumption of the unconscious as such.
This is why I will mainly discuss the concept of the unconscious in its systematic sense, that is, the system Ucs., and its relation to the body and to the concept of interpretation. In addition to these, I will also discuss the system Ucs. as a concept, which is essential in understanding the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge in comparison with empirical sciences. I will shortly discuss the concept of the dynamic unconscious in relation to different levels of psychic registrations. The unconscious in its descriptive meaning seems to be the least interesting of Freud's definitions, as it only describes a state of mind. So I leave it at that.
Concerning the dynamic meaning of the unconscious, Rosenbaum seems to reject the so-called “romantic Gothic” interpretation (Lacan, 1994, pp. 24, 30). The unconscious is not seen as a basement of the psyche, in which old horrors and sexual desires await their revival. In a way, this rejection contains an optimistic view of man, because with a “Gothic” interpretation, man can only become what he already is. Interpreting the dynamic unconscious and lifting repressed material to the consciousness does not add anything essentially new, although reorganising old bits and pieces has its own therapeutic value. The repressed unconscious is linked to language and to the other as is seen in the transference phenomena, whether these are interpreted or not. I think that this kind of work is the core of most dynamic psychotherapies.
The most interesting issue and genuinely psychoanalytic question concerns the non-repressed unconscious as a permanently unconscious system, that is, the system Ucs., or the primal repression as a primal form of defence. This mea