ABSTRACT
"The unconscious", a relatively brief article written almost a century ago, has much packed into it, and much that is amazingly contemporary. Sigmund Freud is arguing that those who would oppose the concept of a meaningful, representational unconscious must do so with more potent arguments than just ruling out unconscious mentation by definitional exclusion. From a biological standpoint, much of Freud's account of the workings of the unconscious in this 1915 article is actually totally unproblematic. Freud's characterisations of the unconscious in "The unconscious" directly conflict with any plausible biological account of such a system. Pace Freud, unconscious processes, as it turns out, have been shown to be quite sensitive to both time and reality. Freud posits that the processes of the unconscious "are not altered by the passage of time". Actually, this statement, viewed from a biologic perspective, seems unproblematic. As long as a drive remains unsatisfied, it is biologically useful that it should not be altered.
