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The author stands to discern what, in his view, was Freud's main finding on psychical functioning more than a century ago. With that aim, he first deals with the subject of suggestion, retrieving Freud's idea, in his article Lines in Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy (1919), according to which "it's very likely that in applying our therapy to the masses we will need to alloy the pure gold of psychoanalysis with the copper of direct suggestion". He then tries to conceptually differentiate direct suggestion, a term coming from hypnosis approaches, from suggestion such as it was used from the start of psychoanalytic method to date. The former approach gave the patient the commandment of forgetting the traumatic event, while the latter used suggestion to stimulate the patient to resolve potential transferences. In the second part of the article, the author discusses the correlation between transference, compulsion to repeat and remembering. With examples taken from some of Freud's technical papers, he underlines that the intimate relation between memories and their transference deployment is present throughout Freud's work. A detailed reading of Chapter III of Beyond the pleasure principle allows the author to search into the concept of agieren, understood as a compulsive enactment of the unconscious. The agieren emerges clinically when repression is diminished, meaning that the analytic work has already went over half the way to find it. Finally, based on the clinical material of a patient in individual analysis, an attempt is made to exemplify in what way the compulsion to repeat is put by the unconscious ego, with its obstinate drive to repress, at the service of the pleasure principle. The sense of that obstinate repression manifested as a compulsion to repeat is to avoid coming in touch with some early childhood events which left a permanent scar in the patients sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the possible meanings of the concept "mind of the terrorist" taken from the study published in the Newsletter, Volume 11, 1, 2002. Certain questions arose over which theoretical concepts had been used by the authors to frame their ideas. It was seen that the denomination "mind of the terrorist" besides corresponding to a psychoanalytical frame of reference, expresses an ideology and a political stance, as occurs implicitly in the majority of psychoanalytical papers. This does not exclude the fact that to produce the figure of a terrorist one should take into consideration variables such as: childhood traumatic experiences, early abandonments, and violent identification figures. However these ideas do not explain the terrorist phenomenon in all its complexity. There is concern over the risk of boxing in the figure of the terrorist within a psychopathological category. The relation subject-social world is not something uniform and has its own conflicts, especially with the alienness of the other social worlds that are terror provoking. Events such as those of September 11 and those in London in 2005, challenge us on how to think them from the standpoint of the Psychoanalytic Theory and the obstacles the established psychoanalytic mind finds in its path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]