Concept
Topographical model
Freud's first picture of the psychical apparatus as a set of systems, the unconscious (Ucs.), the preconscious (Pcs.) and the conscious (Cs.), separated by censorships. It was set out in the seventh chapter of Die Traumdeutung (1900) and in the metapsychological papers of 1915. Each system has its own kind of process and contents, and an idea's place in the apparatus decides whether it can become conscious. From 1923 the structural model of id, ego and super-ego was added to it.
Development
1900
Sigmund Freud introduced by
Die Traumdeutung pictures the psychical apparatus as a series of systems, unconscious, preconscious and conscious, through which excitation passes as through a compound instrument; regression in dreams is a backward movement through them. Das Unbewußte (1915) sets the model out in its fullest form, with the systems Ucs., Pcs. and Cs.
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Die Traumdeutung pictures the psychical apparatus as a series of systems, unconscious, preconscious and conscious, through which excitation passes as through a compound instrument; regression in dreams is a backward movement through them. Das Unbewußte (1915) sets the model out in its fullest form, with the systems Ucs., Pcs. and Cs.
Works
- 1900
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
- 1915
The longest of Freud's metapsychological papers of 1915, first printed in two parts in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse. Freud argues that unconscious mental processes have to be assumed, and separates three senses of the word unconscious: descriptive, dynamic and systematic, the last referring to the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious and the censorships between them. He asks whether feelings can be unconscious, and describes the topography and dynamics of repression in terms of the withdrawal of cathexes and of anticathexis. The system unconscious knows no negation or doubt, is governed by the primary process with its mobile cathexes, is timeless, and replaces external reality with psychical reality. A final section draws on the speech of schizophrenics to distinguish thing-presentations from word-presentations: a conscious presentation includes both, an unconscious one only the thing-presentation.
See also
People
References
- The Unconscious1915 Evidence for a relation
- The Interpretation of Dreams1900 Evidence for a relation