ABSTRACT
Freud's (1900) ‘Copernican’ revolution consisted in reassessing the value previously attached to consciousness and emphasizing that the unconscious was the ‘true psychical reality’ (p. 613), that one had to abandon the overvaluation of the property of being conscious, and that the unconscious was the larger sphere. Although emphasis was understandably placed on the significance of the unconscious, Freud did not necessarily imply that consciousness was of marginal importance. For example, he wrote that ‘the attribute of being conscious forms the departure for all our psychoanalytical investigations and that the attribute of being conscious is the only characteristic of psychical processes that is directly presented to us’ (Freud, 1940, p. 192). He also wrote that consciousness is a fact without parallel, which defied all explanation or description. ‘Nevertheless,’ he wrote, ‘if anyone speaks of consciousness we know immediately and from our most personal experience what is meant by it’ (1940, p. 157).
