ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at the problem of perception and its relationship with consciousness, highlighting that in psychoanalysis, already in Sigmund Freud's works, the game of consciousness, including that of scientific knowledge, is centred on how consciousness is structured. It describes a hypothesis on the relationship between consciousness-the activity of judgement of coherence in particular-and sleep. Psychoanalysis has shown the intrapsychic functions of sleep and the essentiality of this process within the functioning of the whole of the psychic apparatus. Human imperfection consists in the inability to get rid of stimuli that accumulated during the waking state and the ensuing need to come to terms with them during the sleeping state. One can see a sort of shift in responsibility between the state of sleep and that of waking: sleep leaves a nocturnal residue for the waking state, and the latter leaves a day-time residue for the sleeping state.