ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud believed that affirming the existence of unconscious mental processes was one of the required “corner-stones of psycho-analytic theory.” The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus Complex – these constitute the principle subject matter of psycho-analysis and the foundations of its theory. When Freud first demonstrated that unconscious thoughts and feelings could be both legible and comprehensible, his discovery was so powerful that it may have obscured the fact that he only claimed that some part of the unconscious can be known by the symbolic traces it leaves on our conscious, waking lives. The chapter shows that any advances in the clinical understanding of the unconscious and the expansions of analytic listening and technique that may follow are welcome and necessary additions to our praxis.
