ABSTRACT
The traces constituting the fantasy scenario of unconscious internal reality are in fact very different from a given memory system. The unconscious is activated as a network of associations among traces characterized by specific somatic markers, inscribed in various brain structures that cannot actually be localized. Though the fantasy scenario intrudes on awareness and disturbs the perception of reality and the conduct of action, certain elements of the fantasy scenario do not make it all the way to working memory and hence to awareness. Although one might possibly admit that the neuro-biological mechanism involved in conscious, voluntary forgetting is at work in the unconscious repression of the representative of the drive, it is less likely that this mechanism is also at work in the repression of the affect of the somatic state. Moreover, for Freud himself the repression of the representative of the drive can take place in situations in which the quantum of affect is not repressed.
