ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the mechanics of the unconscious as outlined by S. Freud. Freud also refers to unconscious impulses achieving "a high degree of organisation". This is an idea that will become especially important for J. Lacan. Ernst Kris's basically saying that he's much more Freudian than all of the post-Freudians, including Freud's daughter. Anna Freud doesn't mention him at all in her introduction to Freud's essay on the unconscious—but she does mention J. M. Charcot, Hyppolite Bernheim, and Joseph Breuer. In the formation of symptoms, consciousness looks for a new object to which to attach the affect. It's a brilliant solution that seems to let the unconscious have its way at the same time as keeping consciousness happy—a truly ingenious compromise formation. In 1915 Freud wrote his metapsychological essay on "The unconscious". The key difference between an unconscious presentation and a preconscious one is to do with whether or not the cathexis is representable in words.
