"The theory of therapy, especially the transference, requires a psychoanalytical theory of knowledge, or at least of psychoanalytical knowledge. If we retain the original insight that reenactment is a prerequisite for gaining consciousness of the repressed unconscious, we must suppose that there is no direct channel of communication between consciousness and the repressed unconscious, with the result that the repressed unconscious energies must go out into external reality before they can be perceived by consciousness.

"This conclusion is logical anyhow, if the hypothesis of the existence of a repressed unconscious is combined with the common-sense assumption that consciousness is oriented toward external reality. And in fact Freud develops this doctrine explicitly in The Ego and the Id. Defining consciousness as the superficies of the mental apparatus, forming a distinct system functioning nearest to the external world, he goes on to ask, "What does it mean when we say 'making the unconscious conscious'?"

"He excludes the possibility that unconscious ideas advance from within directly to consciousness, and advances the solution that "anything arising from within that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external perceptions." He concludes by saying that by this assumption, and only by this assumption, can psychoanalysis and its knowledge be reconciled with ''the theorem that all knowledge has its origin in external perception."

"How then does the unconscious "transform itself into an external perception" in order to become conscious? If this theorem is interpreted in the light of the transference phenomenon, then it follows that the repressed impulses must first find real objects in the external world and attach themselves to those real objects before their nature can become manifest to the subject. To put it crudely, the act of love (or hate) must accompany knowledge of repressed love (or hate).

Richard Koenigsberg