Abstract

What distinguishes human intelligence? Without a doubt the ability to think and represent even what is not present, that is, to use absence as a source of thought, to have memory of the past and to imagine the future: representation, symbolization, memory, imagination and prediction of the future are the most significant characteristics that have allowed the development of human intelligence. But there is even more: the need to believe in its connection with the sacred and the unconscious cognitive function, which only psychoanalysis has been able to understand and develop. Intelligence is commonly referred to as conscious knowledge, which has conscious thinking activity at its center. But for Freud, knowledge passes – more than through awareness – through the acquisition of information acquired unconsciously: it is the unconscious, in a sort of constant «pulsation», that really allows perception and consciousness, through emission of psychic pseudopods that probe the surrounding environment allowing the inscription of messages that are collected from the external (and also internal) world. Consciousness would be an intermittent event, which occurs when unconscious exploration opens to the P/C system (perception/consciousness). Our intelligence then, far from being an exercise in awareness, as it has always been thought, is rather a completely unaware understanding of reality which in turn allows us to identify, choose, imagine, invent