The Real Unconscious: Psychoanalysis as a Theory of Consciousness

Inquiries into hallucinatory wish fulfillment and the unconscious converge and, by distinguishing the concept of the unconscious in psychoanalysis from that of cognitive psychology, serve to bring out what is most essential to the psychoanalytic conception. Freud's topographical model is used to stress that the psychoanalytic unconscious can be understood only in relation to theories of consciousness and wishing. Moreover, in contrast to the cognitive conception, psychoanalysis holds that the processing of thought in the human mind is inseparable from the activity of desire. This leads to further psychoanalytic reflections on the interrelation of conscious and unconscious, wishing and thinking, and, in consequence, on transference and the mechanism of unconscious fantasy.