ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud gives an eminently clinical answer to his fundamental question: It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious. At least implicitly, Freud complements the topographic model that he is about to describe with another model centred on the analytic couple. As Freud emphasises, this working model is to be judged by the quality and success of the psychoanalytic procedure that it sustains. Freud is careful to show the limits to the co-operation, pointing out that "to every transition from one system to that immediately above it there corresponds a new censorship", and that there are unconscious ego defences that form "the strongest functional antithesis to the repressed". In "Unconscious emotions", Freud relinquishes his earlier provisional limitation of a "psychical act" to an "idea", in order to tackle the status of affect.
