The notion of the unrepressed unconscious has been a major psychoanalytic puzzle since the inception of the discipline. Psychoanalytic thinking about the nature of consciousness has always implicitly distinguished between a non-conscious and a dynamically unconscious mental content, whether marked by distinctions such as repressed versus unrepressed, preconscious versus unconscious or, using Sandler’s three-box model, past versus present unconscious. Where the line is drawn, how the distinctions are made, may depend more on the subject matter on which the scholar is focused, which in turn calls for particular metapsychological models. This excellent book attempts to map this somewhat controversial field and addresses the dichotomy from six distinct perspectives that share the wish to integrate contemporary neuroscience with psychoanalytic perspectives, using the clinical setting as the primary constraint on theory-building. In this foreword to a unique and outstanding contribution by the major scholars in this field, I can do no more than set out the distinction between the Freudian and current approaches to the dichotomy and introduce our own rather limited perspective (Fonagy & Allison, in press), which has the advantage of drawing on the past work of many of the contributors to this volume
