ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains the French conception of the psychoanalytic process bears witness to the importance it gives to Freud's thinking on his first model of the mind and on a kind of regression similar to that which occurs in dreams. In various ways, French psychoanalysts have highlighted the fundamental role of the preconscious in the process by which things 'become conscious' and psychic change is brought about. Preconscious thinking would therefore appear to depend on the setting up of categories of space, time, causality and permanence in the first two years of life; language development is based on those categories. Real, Imaginary and Symbolic were introduced by Lacan in the 1950s when he described his conception of the topography of the mind and his structural approach to the unconscious 'structured as a language'.
