Chapter 3. The Unconscious (1915) of Papers on Metapsychology - Study Guide by Sigmund Freud

Having discussed 'ideas' and the unconscious, Freud now looks at whether there are also unconscious instinctual impulses, emotions and feelings. He proposes that instincts can never become conscious - only their ideas can, and they must be represented in the unconscious by their idea too - as if it did not manifest itself by an idea - we could know nothing about it.

With respect to emotion, it seems that the essence of an emotion is that we should be aware of it, but in psychoanalytic practice unconscious love, hate, anger etc. is often spoken of. The main difference between ideas (and instincts therefore) and affects and emotions, being that ideas are cathexes - basically of memory traces - whilst affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge - the final manifestations of which are perceived as feelings. Therefore when we talk of unconscious affect or emotion, we mean that it has been repressed (by one of three possible vicissitudes see before) so whilst it seems accurate to talk of affective structure in the Ucs. it must be noted that there may be others that become part of the Cs. Furthermore the importance of the system Cs. (Pcs.) as regards access to the release of affect throws some light upon the form taken by an illness. So, having asserted that in repression the affect and its idea are severed, each undergoing separate vicissitudes - it seems that in reality the affect does not arise until the break through to a new representation in the Cs has been achieved.

4. Topography and Dynamics of Repression

Having established that repression is a process that affects ideas on the border between the Ucs. and Pcs. (Cs.) Freud now ventures to describe this in more detail. He proposes that it must be a matter of a withdrawal of cathexis, but this prompts the question - In which system does the cathexis that is withdrawn belong? From looking at repression proper, where the repression withdraws from the idea the preconscious cathexis which belongs to the system Pcs. The idea then remains uncathected, or receives cathexis from the Ucs., or retains the Ucs. cathexis which it had. It is noteworthy that here the functional hypothesis easily defeats the topographical one - since this must be based on an assumption that the transition from the Ucs. to the next, is effected through a change in its state rather than new registration alone (see II).

Freud proposes though that this description is unsatisfactory, and therefore adopts a third account of psychical phenomena (to join the topographical and functional points of view) - the economic one - which endeavours to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude. He then proposes that when one has described a psychical process with respect to these three aspects, the term 'metapsychological' can be coined. He then looks at metapsychological descriptions of the process of repression in the three transference neuroses - replacing cathexis by libido, since in these cases the instincts are all sexual in nature.

Having described anxiety neurosis in terms of these metapsychological aspects, he then looks at how this reflects the other two neuroses - conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis - which he argues are similar. Nevertheless Freud highlights their differences and the role of 'anticathexis', concluding that it is because of the prominence of the anticathexis and the absence of discharge that the work of repression seems far less successful in anxiety hysteria and in obsessional neurosis than in conversion hysteria.

5. The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs.

Freud notes that the distinction between the two systems the Cs. and the Ucs. is added to by the fact that processes in the one system the Ucs, show properties that are not found in the Pcs. Or Cs. These characteristics of the Ucs. processes are - exemption from mutual contradiction (when two or more instinctual impulses exist side by side) - but rather a compromise, timelessness (i.e. the processes of the Ucs. are not ordered temporally, and replacement of the external by psychical reality.

These processes of the Ucs., in turn are only cognizable under the conditions of dreaming and neurosis - when the Pcs. Is set back to an earlier stage - i.e. regression. However the full significance of these characteristics is only fully appreciated if they are contrasted and compared with the Pcs., which Freud declines from going into in detail here. He does however note that the processes of the Pcs. do show an inhibition of the tendency of cathected ideas towards discharge - hence the proposition by Breuer of