ABSTRACT
The interior dimension of human experience is the subject matter of psychoanalysis. It does pay attention to conscious thoughts and feelings, fantasies, daydreams, perceptions, values, and beliefs. Its heart and soul, however, are in the subterranean strata of psychic life. What lurks beyond awareness, beneath intellectual grasp, and beside platitudes and rationalizations is of greatest interest to psychoanalysis. Puzzling obsessions, utterly unrealistic phobias, bizarre convictions, embarrassing parapraxes, incomprehensible dreams, and, yes, miraculous feats of resilience and creativity draw the attention of psychoanalysis with irresistible magnetism. To find meaning in the seemingly meaningless and to add an undiscovered layer of hermeneutics to the flatness of logical existence is what psychoanalysis is about. To put it bluntly, if one were forced to select the most outstanding contribution of the discipline’s founder, Sigmund Freud, the three word answer would be: unconscious mental life.
