Major panel: The unconscious.

What is your theory of unconscious processes? What other conceptions would you contrast with your conceptualization? Given the multiplicity of psychoanalytic theories and systems of thought, it is not surprising that a wide variety of conceptions of such a key notion as the unconscious can be discerned today. These extend from the classical definition of the unconscious as the locus of repressed instinctual representatives to dissociated, unformulated self‐states. The neurosciences and the cognitive sciences too, as well as developmental research, have contributed significantly to a modification of our view of the unconscious. I am convinced that we must not disregard these developments in other disciplines, but that we must give them careful consideration so as to determine whether their findings are compatible, both conceptually and in terms of content, with the phenomena that we investigate. In an analyst’s mind, theories are much less elaborately formulated, and available in less self‐contained form, than in their published versions. An analyst may therefore integrate diverse concepts from various preferred authors and schools into a theoretical system of reference that includes personal elements and is consistent with both his scientific and his personal pre‐scientific convictions. In this way, he accumulates in the course of time a body of implicit clinical knowledge that possesses a high degree of complexity and cannot be represented directly in words. Our theories attempt to formulate concrete situations in abstract terms, and this is often possible only by recourse to metaphors. In any self‐reflective questioning of one’s theoretical ideas, one cannot fail to encounter the element of metaphor. This applies particularly to an abstract theoretical notion such a