a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

compare the system of the unconscious to a large ante-chamber, in which the
psychic impulses rub elbows with one another, as separate beings. There
opens out of this ante-chamber another, a smaller room, a sort of parlor,
which consciousness occupies. But on the threshold between the two rooms
there stands a watchman; he passes on the individual psychic impulses,
censors them, and will not let them into the parlor if they do not meet with
his approval. You see at once that it makes little difference whether the
watchman brushes a single impulse away from the threshold, or whether he
drives it out again after it has already entered the parlor. It is a question here
only of the extent of his watchfulness, and the timeliness of his judgment. Still
working with this simile, we proceed to a further elaboration of our
nomenclature. The impulses in the ante-chamber of the unconscious cannot
be seen by the conscious, which is in the other room; therefore for the time
being they must remain unconscious. When they have succeeded in pressing
forward to the threshold, and have been sent back by the watchman, then
they are unsuitable for consciousness and we call them suppressed. Those
impulses, however, which the watchman has permitted to cross the threshold
have not necessarily become conscious; for this can happen only if they have
been successful in attracting to themselves the glance of the conscious. We
therefore justifiably call this second room the system of the fore-conscious. In
this way the process of becoming conscious retains its purely descriptive
sense. Suppression then, for any individual impulse, consists in not being able
to get past the watchman from the system of the unconscious to that of the
fore-conscious. The watchman himself is long since known to us; we have
met him as the resistance which opposed us when we attempted to release
the suppression through analytic treatment.
Now I know you will say that these conceptions are as crude as they are
fantastic, and not at all permissible in a scientific discussion. I know they are
crude—indeed, we even know that they are incorrect, and if we are not very
much mistaken we have a better substitute for them in readiness. Whether
they will continue then to appear so fantastic to you I do not know. For the
time being, they are useful conceptions, similar to the manikin Ampère who
swims in the stream of the electric current. In so far as they are helpful in the
understanding of our observation, they are by no means to be despised. I
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