The Unconscious

Abstract

More than six decades after Freud's death, psychoanalysts are certainly not more unified in their view of the concept of the unconscious—its structure and its way of working—than in ‘the good old days’. Challenges are facing psychoanalysis from many perspectives, urging psychoanalysts to continuously reconsider their theoretical grounds. This paper pursues three lines of argumentation concerning the Unconscious. The first line concerns the relation to neuroscience and this paper suggests the concept of background feelings (Damasio) as a contribution to another understanding of deficits in the psychoanalytic relationship. The second line concerns the relation to cognitive semiotics, and here, the paper stresses the concept of basic image sehemata as a possible link between the subject's pre-reflective awareness of the other and the internal world of phantasy. The third line pursues a concept of the analytic interpretation which is close to the Freudian idea that psychoanalysis is the communication between two Unconscious, and, consequently, that the psycho-analytic interpretation is not per se a conscious act.

Keywords:

• schemes
• emotions
• interpretation
• neuroscience
• semiotics
• the unconscious