Dynamic versus Cognitive Unconscious

All psychodynamic theories of personality and psychopathology are based on the notion of conflict involving unconscious forces. In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the conflict is between primitive sexual and aggressive impulses arising from the id, and the demands of external reality, and of conscience, processed respectively by the ego and the superego. The sexual and aggressive impulses, and other mental contents associated with them, are rendered unconscious by means of repression. But these repressedmental contents leak through the repressive barrier to express themselves in experience and action—albeit in symbolically disguised form. Hence Breuer and Freud’s classic formulation, in their Studies on hysteria (1893–1895) that “hysterics suffer from reminiscences”—meaning that their symptoms were symbolic expressions of repressed traumatic memories. The purpose of psychoanalysis was to lead the patient to insight concerning these unconscious determinants of experience, thought, and action—to bring these unconscious impulses into consciousness, so that they could be acknowledged and dealt with rationally. Various “neofreudian” theorists, including the object-relations theorists, placed more emphasis on the origins of intrapsychic conflict in the real social world, whereas the psychoanalytic ego psychologists allowed the ego cognitive functions, such as perception and memory, which did not necessarily involve conflict. This entry is concerned primarily with the unconscious as conceived by classical psychoanalysis and represented by Freud’s “metapsychological”