ABSTRACT
Clinical psychoanalysis led Freud to recognize the existence of certain 'contents' inaccessible to consciousness without the lifting of certain resistances. These unconscious thoughts are efficient in man and determine the symptomatic acts known as the formations of the unconscious. In effect Lacan insists upon the representational nature of the unconscious and upon the fact that the formation of the unconscious takes place 'by cleavage'. People have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being entry into the conscious. Freud also says that it is the ideational representatives which fix the instinct and provide the means by which it becomes inscribed in the psychical apparatus. On the basis of this Freudian data, the Lacanians have provided a structural representation of the unconscious as a complex network of ideational representatives. Freud himself provides the basis for such a representation in the Traumdeutung.
