Okay, Freud came up with a trilateral model initially, was known as the first topographical modeland he divided the mind to three functional units, consciousness, system, preconsciousness and system unconscious.

So conscious, preconscious and unconscious.

Consciousness he described as an organ for sensing mental qualities.

Pre-conscious is essentially unconscious, descriptively, like we have no access to it, but the preconscious, the mental contents in the preconscious are able to enter consciousness if we focus our attention on them.

So the preconscious is like this big refrigerator with many, many goodies and candies and food and everything, but it is sealed off from consciousness via the door.

But if you open the door by focusing your attention, you can extract the goodies and foodies from the refrigerator and render them conscious, consume them.

Freud was not known for consistency.

Many of his views over the years, because he’s been active for like 40, 50 years, so over the years he contradicted himselfand the system unconscious was not exempt from his vacillations.

Initially, he described the contents of the system unconscious as thoughts that have been excluded from or denied access to the preconscious by the operation of a filtering mechanism which he called censorship.

So the unconscious is full of thoughts.

There is a censor.

And these thoughts are not allowed to reach the preconscious and at least potentially consciousness.

This is the repressed or dynamic unconscious.

It operates under the pleasure principle.

It is known as a primary process, urges, drives, primitive, reptilian, the stem brain, things which are usually socially frowned upon or even punished severely.

It’s illogical. It’s irrational down there. It’s seething and fermenting and needs to be controlled and contained.

Just like the proletariat in Vienna in the turn of the 20th century, we see a reflection of this in the structure of the mind.

Freud argued that the unconscious is illogical and rational, but he listed five distinct characteristics of the unconscious.

And he said that these characteristics distinguish the unconscious from the preconscious.

Go on, exemption from mutual contradiction.

The unconscious can hold two mutually exclusive cognitions together, mutually contradictory.

Number two, exemption from negation.

In other words, when one is confronted with a repressed wish or a thought or a feeling that had come to consciousness, one tends to negate it.

One tends to defend oneself against the repressed content.

One says, it’s not mine. One disowns it, disavows it.

This is called negation.

In the unconscious, there’s no negation. There is no discrepancy. There is no fight or internal conflict. Everyone is one big happy family. Everyone gets along.

Displacement.

So many things that happen in the unconscious are misattributed to other processes or traits or behaviors.

Condensation.

When a single ID, image, memory, thought, or dream object represents several associations and ideas.

So one thing stands for many.

These are all features of the unconscious.

Timelessness, which we will discuss a bit later, and disregard from reality.

In his famous essay, 1923, Ego and Id, Freud rejected the model of the three systems.

He disowned and disavowed the model of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious.

And he replaced it with what came to be known as the structural or second topographical model, which had what Freud called “instantzen” agencies.

Ego, id, and superego, which is the famous trilateral model of Freud, which everyone knows.

From that moment on, Freud actually did not use the term “unconscious” and did not link it to any mental system.

It fell out of favor in early psychoanalytic liturgy.

It was still used descriptively or as an adjective to refer to a property of mental events or systems, but not as a system.

So the id was described by Freud as irrational.

And so people mistakenly connected the id with the unconscious.

Because they said the unconscious is irrational and illogical.

The id is irrational and illogical.

So the id must be the unconscious.

And Freud himself described the id as possessing the five characteristics which he had previously attributed to the unconscious.

He said that the logical laws of thought do not apply in the Ego.

And so this created a huge mess and a confusion which persists to this very day.

The rational and logical components of unconscious mental functioning were pushed into the Ego.

And the Ego was described as a mental module which represents reason and common sense.

But the Ego has an unconscious part.

Basically in the first topographical module, the unconscious was comprised of irrational, illogical components and rational and logical components.

Now the Eid was the repository of all the irrational, illogical components of the previous unconscious.

And the Ego was the repository of the logical and rational components of the previous unconscious system.

So both the Eid and the Ego have powerful unconscious elements.

The Ego is partly unconscious.

Super ego is a part of the Ego.

It’s like the tip of the iceberg of the Ego.

So the Super Ego by definition is also partly unconscious.

So now do we need the preconscious?

Because the old distinction between unconscious and preconscious was now replaced.

Now we have unconscious Ego, unconscious Id.

Why do we need the preconscious?

Let’s go back to the first topographical module.

You remember, conscious, preconscious, unconscious.

Freud at the time said that you need to analyze what he called narcissistic psychoneurosis.

Today we call them psychosis.

He said that if you analyze these narcissistic psychoneurosis, they can furnish us with conceptions and I’m quoting him, can furnish us with conceptions through which the enigmatic unconscious system will be brought more within our reach as it were made tangible.

The first theory of mental structure, the topographical model, he said that you remember the mind is divided to psycholocalities, the unconscious, conscious and preconscious.

And he said that his psychical life is a conflict between these three.

And this is what came to be known as the dynamical model.

He said that there is energy there. Energy is stored in repressed memories and repression is a form of energy condensation.

Think of it as a battery. Protection is creating a battery. And when events are brought or memories are brought from the unconscious to consciousness, they bring with them, they drag with them this energy, a process known as abreaction.

Memory itself exists without any specific prejudice or interest.

The energetics, the structure of psychic processes is determined beyond consciousness.

And this came to be known as the economic point of view.

Finally, an inaccessibility to consciousness is undeniable, the descriptive point of view, but a transition is possible.

This became the heart of psychoanalysis.

These representations that are intolerable, irreconcilable, repressed, durable, pathogenic, beyond association, forgotten, all of these were outside of consciousness.

Like one big trash can in the unconscious.

Conscious system is not merely that which is outside the field of consciousness at any given time, but that which has been radically separated from consciousness by repression.

So cannot enter the conscious-preconscious system without some kind of distortion, energetic distortion.

This was a very warlike, civil warlike description of the mind.

The mind contains wishes which are unconscious, indestructible. The mind contains repressed memories and events, affected by libido. By libido, in other words, there’s emotional investment there, there’s emotional energy, free energy.

All this is regulated by the pleasure principle.

The primary processes of displacement and condensation operate in the unconscious system.

The conflict between repressed instincts and censorship creates dreams. It’s a compromised formation, kind of.

I’m going to tell you what’s…

It’s like the dream is saying…

Dreams are saying to you, “We’re going to tell you what’s in your unconscious, but we’re going to do it symbolically.

We can’t talk to you directly. We have to talk to you via code or symbols.”

Imagine all this seething cauldron, witches’ cauldron, is the mind.

It goes on inside your mind.

The reality of the unconscious reveals itself in numerous localized processes.

I mentioned joking, forgetting words, symptomatic activities, and so on and so forth.

The unconscious system depends on instincts.

Repression is constantly in operation. It’s a primal repression.

And actually, Freud implied, although he never said it directly and totally, he implied that repression creates the unconscious.

Repression is the outcome of unconscious.

He said that the unconscious contains the things, things, cathexes, the emotional investment in things of the objects, the first and true object cathexes, while the nucleus of the unconscious system consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge the cathexes, to discharge the energy.

That is to say, it consists of wishful impulses.

He wrote this in 1915, and two years later, he says that the unconscious is the missing link between the body, the mind, the soma, and the psyche.

So we have inside our heads, inside our minds, this cavity, this black hole, this system which is timeless. Nothing there is ordered temporarily. There’s no timeline. Nothing is altered by the passage of time. There’s no reference to time at all.

Then Freud wrote, “There is an exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process, mobility of cathexes, timelessness, and replacement of the external by psychical reality.”

You’re beginning to see the link to narcissism, because in narcissism, in early childhood, and if it persists into adulthood, in pathological narcissism, there is a replacement of external objects with internal objects.

There’s a confusion between external objects and internal objects. The external is replaced by psychical reality, which is a great description of how the narcissist relates to the world.

Narcissism therefore is a hostile takeover of consciousness by the unconscious.

The unconscious takes over the narcissist.

The unconscious drives the narcissist.

The narcissist is an inverted or reversed person. His unconscious is out there, and his consciousness is repressed.

In Freud’s second theory of mental structure, the structural theory, the mind is divided into the agencies of ego, superego, and id, which I mentioned.

Here, I emphasize again, not one of them is identical to the unconscious. All of them have unconscious parts.

Now, this should not be confused with the unconscious concept.

Freud wrote in an essay titled “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” he defined the term unconscious concept.

He gave an example.

“Feces, baby, and penis form a unity, an unconscious concept, sit venya verbo, the concept, namely, of something small that can be separated from one’s body.

So Freud gave an example of a few things, feces, baby, penis, and he said that it creates a concept, a principle of operation, an organizing principle, an idea that makes sense of the world.

And in this case, the idea is there’s me, and there are small things that come out of me or are not connected to me or can be disconnected from me.

This is known as an unconscious concept.

In philosophy, concepts refer to groupings of objects, of experience. So we have objects of experience and we group them into classes.

Freud adopted this philosophical approach to the unconscious concept.

He says it’s the equivalence of objects within a certain relationship that allows us to talk about the concept.

The notion presented by Freud is complex. It’s complicated.

These concepts are unconscious. They’re not the result of a process of analysis or judgment or, you know, they just happen. They just erupt or occur or emerge.

And we, now we come to the crux of the godawful confusion, even among scholars, and the fact that there is no agreed terminology.

We use unconscious in three separate ways.

We use unconscious descriptively.

And it refers to the mental, the fact that mental content is not accessible to reflective self-awareness.

So descriptive consciousness includes the preconscious.

Descriptive unconscious, I’m sorry, includes the preconscious.

Then we have another type of unconscious, the system unconscious.

It’s an aspect of mind operating according to the pleasure/unpleasure principle and primary process ed thinking, as I mentioned before.

This is the classic Freudian approach.

And it is not the same as the descriptive unconscious.

The descriptive unconscious is functional. It’s operational.

If you can’t think of it, if it doesn’t come to your awareness, it’s unconscious.

Freud said something else.

He said there’s a structure there. And this structure is subject to the pleasure or unpleasure principle and their primary processes andthey are repressed and, you know, came up with a whole movie about what’s happening inside the mind.

It’s not merely something that you can’t recall or something you have no access to.

That’s not the unconscious.

There might be some content in the unconscious.

The unconscious is a dynamic system according to Freud.

And then there is, this leads to the dynamic unconscious.

It’s the repressed materialand repression is an active process. It occurs all the time. Otherwise, the material can emerge or erupt and disrupt function.

So the material has to be repressed all the time actively.