ABSTRACT
More generally, the prefrontal area can be associated with the preconscious system because of the function Freud allocated to attention of regulating the passage of stimulation from preconscious to conscious. It is understandable why Freud was unable to conceptualize well the many properties of the unconscious, limiting himself to the meaning he attributed to attention; a property that he described as having characteristics that today authors would define as cognitive. Thinking back to the development of Freudian theory, it seems likely that Freud had imagined that the different forces were operating in the unconscious even though he did not know exactly how to distribute them in the context of child development. In the structural vision of The Ego and the Id he certainly sought to position the structure of these unconscious forces better in the tripartition of the ego-id-superego.
