ABSTRACT
One of the key features of psychoanalysis is the unconscious. Freud distinguishes the dynamic unconscious from the preconscious and the conscious. The dynamic unconscious provides the basis for the preconscious, which concerns those contents that are not yet conscious but can eventually become conscious. Together, this amounts to a nested hierarchy with different layers of non-conscious, dynamic unconscious, preconscious, and conscious (including phenomenal and access consciousness). This nested hierarchy on the psychic level corresponds to a more or less analogously nested hierarchy of different layers of the brain’s neural activity, including spontaneous activity, prestimulus activity, and early and late stimulus-induced activity. Together, the topography and dynamic of conscious–unconscious in psychoanalysis can be related to a more or less analogous topography and dynamic of the brain’s neural activity. Topography and dynamic are thus shared by brain and unconscious–conscious providing their “common currency”, which, more generally, converges neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
