A brief treatise on the unconscious

The author recapitulates his conception of the unconscious which, though taking its bearings from Freud's central thoughts on the subject penned in 1915, display notable differences both from this approach and - more especially - from Freud's later metapsychological hypotheses. Central to the author's view is the link between the concept of the unconscious and the repression process. In an examination of five key issues - the realism of the unconscious; the translation model of repression; the characteristics of the unconscious and their explanation in terms of repression; the unconscious in life and in the cure context; the relation between the unconscious and the metaphysical - the author urges a view of psychoanalysis which, though diverging from the Freudian viewpoint, does unstinting justice to the unexampled novelty of Freud's theories and methods.