ABSTRACT
When Sigmund Freud repressed knowledge of the maternal order he also rid himself of a theory of mind that was based not on banishment, but on seduction. When Freud wrote himself into a corner he would engage a literary trope. Freud’s writing simply demonstrated his view that we think free associatively. Typically, he followed not just one line of thought but scores of “chains of ideas”. Freud lapses into a very brief literary depression, implicitly wondering if he should scrap his entire theory of the unconscious but finishes the chapter with a nod to the future and the hope that somehow this problem can be resolved. Freud was clear that there were two forms of unconscious: an unconscious process and unconscious content. As Freud repeatedly pointed out, there are non-repressed unconscious contents, and so, by implication, there are unconscious processes that do not operate to repress contents but to form contents for other reasons.
