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The [[representation]] on a map of the physical features of a landscape.
In [[psychoanalysis]] the term is used to describe the differentiation of the mind or psyche into subsystems with specific functions and characteristics.
[[Freud]]'s topographies of the psyche owe much to nineteenth-century theories of cerebral localization, which ascribe different mental functions to different areas of the brain.
IT was the study of dreams that led Freud to the conclusion that unconscious activities such as dreaming are quite divorced from the conscious mind and literally take place on ''ein anderer Schauplatz'' (another stage or theatre).
[[Freud]] evolved two distinct topographies.
The first, elaborated between 1900 and 1915, describes an apparatus comrpising [[unconscious]], [[preconscious]] and [[conscious]] systems, with mechanism of [[censorship]] to prevent ideas from moving between them.
Considerations of representability and other mechanisms of the [[dream-work]] filter or censor the content of dreams and fantasies before allowing them to enter the [[conscious]] mind, usually because their sexual content is unacceptable to conscious thought-processes.
The second or 'structural' topography, elaborated from 1920 onwards, describes a structure of trhree agencies known respectively as the [[id]], the [[ego]] and the [[super-ego]].
