ABSTRACT
As is well known, in the very last years of the nineteenth century Freud exposed the remarkable properties of free-associative discourse, thus initiating the discipline of psychoanalysis. I am discussing this in terms of the discoveries of the dynamically repressed unconscious, our resistance to understanding the repressive or revealing-concealing construction of self-consciousness, and the implied contradictorious pluritemporality of the human psyche. Most of this – perhaps with the exception of the issues of temporality – is widely acknowledged but, as I have shown, much misunderstood.
