ABSTRACT
Although we may on occasion mystify ourselves, and although others may mystify us in ways that incline us to invoke unconscious motivation, there is no reason why the unconscious itself needs to remain mysterious. Freud was not a magician; nor did he have supernatural powers. He looked carefully at strange phenomena of everyday life, and he thought hard about how to make sense of them. ‘How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious?,’ Freud asks. ‘It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious. Psychoanalytic work shows us every day that translation of this kind is possible.’2 What is the unconscious and how does it work? The next six chapters are devoted to answering this question.
