ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes the unconscious in practice—that is, with mental activity that makes its presence felt while keeping its identity undisclosed. The term "the unconscious" has survived in psychoanalytic discourse despite its intended replacement by "the id" in S. Freud's structural model. From the outset, psychoanalytic writers, including Freud, have used the term "the unconscious" in two different senses: first, to denote an archaic, primordial region of mental life permanently inaccessible to awareness; second, to refer to actively impinging, unconscious mental activity that has immediate effects on the individual. Melanie Klein saw the basic reservoir of mental life not as unattached drives but impulse-invested internal object relations accumulated as unconscious phantasies. The author suggests a paper on psychic reality that it is only when an unconscious phantasy is given the status of a belief by the ego that it develops consequences.
