THE PSYCHOANALYTIC CONSTITUTION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS: CURRENT PERSPECTIVES

An analogy is suggested between the mathematical concept of limits and the concept of the unconscious, which proceeds from Freud's choice to investigate not reality in itself, but its psychically observable manifestations, its ideational con tents. That involves a precise operational delimitation: the unconscious that we can investigate is essentially a representational unconscious. To what degree, then, is it possible to extend our research beyond representational territory? Beginning with various meanings of the unconscious outlined by Freud, the necessity is identified of differentiating clinically observable elements and currents that come to nourish unconscious processes and contents: the rudiments of thoughts and affects that have never reached consciousness; disavowed and split representations; sensorial and emotional, unsymbolized experiences; desymbolized mental contents. These processes share the unconscious constitution of untransformed, incomplete psychic acts. It follows that, on the one hand, the unconscious cannot be understood as a psychic province or a crucible of drives; but essentially as a way of thinking characterized by determined proprieties and operational rules; and, on the other hand, that its sphere is extended by "forms of repression", by "forms of negation", and by precursory processes of representation.