ABSTRACT
In 1899–1900, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud put forward the conception of the bi-directional nature of psychical processes. Dreams had enabled him to discover a dismembered temporality, his initial intuition of non-unified time. The sexual theory returned to a time ordered traditionally, that is, in terms of the growth characteristic of life. In short, Freud was concerned with the individual’s prehistory, with the beliefs that the child has elaborated as answers to the mysteries of sexuality, his own and his parents’, which are related to the question of his own origins. The “Papers on metapsychology”, marking a time of uncertainty and integration, gathered together a good many of Freud’s earlier ideas as well as opening the way for new ones. This was Freud’s ultimate attempt to accomplish a theoretical integration of the first topographical model in which the various determinations were linked together on a psychical level, beyond realm of psychology.
