ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of the past and present unconscious was an attempt to locate and clarify at what levels of psychic development analysts operate. It describes the past unconscious as acting as a dynamic template, as structuring organisations that form the underpinning for the immediate here-and-now unconscious strivings and responses of the older individual. The present unconscious resembles Sigmund Freud's Preconscious system in some ways. It can be regarded as the area of the mind containing the current preoccupations and the unconscious wishful phantasies, which represent the present-day counterparts of, developments from, and derivatives of, those infantile reactions, which we attribute to, and locate in, the past unconscious. The dynamic templates of the past unconscious are sets of procedures or schemas reflecting the modes of mental functioning of the specific young child within each adult.
