On Freud's "The Unconscious"

If there ever was one word that could represent the essence of Freud's work, that word would be 'unconscious'. Indeed, Freud himself regarded his 1915 paper 'The Unconscious' as central to clarifying the fundamentals of his metapsychology. The paper delineates the topographic model of the mind and spells out the concepts of primary and secondary process thinking, thing and word presentations, timelessness of the unconscious, condensation and symbolism, unconscious problem solving, and the relationship between the system Ucs and repression. Examining these proposals in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as from the perspective of current neurophysiology and ethology, nine distinguished analysts take Freud's ideas further in ways that have implications for both psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Salman Akhtar, MD, was born in India and completed his medical and psychiatric education there. Upon arriving in the USA in 1973, he repeated his psychiatric training at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and then obtained psychoanalytic training from the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. Currently, he is Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He has authored, edited or co-edited more than 300 publications including books on psychiatry and psychoanalysis and several collections of poetry. He is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia. Salman Akhtar received the Sigourney Award in 2012. Mary Kay O'Neil, a Supervising and Training Analyst of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, is in private practice in Montreal, Quebec. Currently, she is Associate Director of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis (Quebec, English). She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, where she was on the staff at the University of Toronto Psychiatric Service and Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. She is author of 'The Unsung Psychoanalyst: The Quiet Influence of Ruth Easser' and co-editor of 'Confidentiality: Ethical Perspectives and Clinical Dilemmas'. Her research and publications include articles in areas such as depression and young adult development, emotional needs of sole-support mothers and their children, post-analytic contact between analyst and analysand, and psychoanalytic ethics. She has served on psychoanalytic ethics committees at local, national, and international levels; as a reviewer for JAPA, the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis; and, currently, on the North American Editorial Board of the 'International Journal of Psychoanalysis'.