ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the reader to something of the background to psychoanalytic thinking and to a few conceptual areas that act as a frame for the development of psychoanalysis from its beginnings. These concepts of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious aspects of the mind, the topographic model, help the readers to have a sense of the depth of the mind and of having degrees of access to it. The structural model offers a way of thinking about how the mind has developed through infancy to adulthood, again the layers of maturity that interact with each other. This model sits within the topographical model and consists of three aspects: id; ego; and superego. For most reasonably emotionally mature adults there is a balance between the id, the ego, and the superego. A kind of negotiation goes on with the ego as a mediator and a voice of reason.
