A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis quotes

With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions.

Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.

Therefore let us not underestimate the use of words in psychotherapy, and let us be satisfied if we may be auditors of the words which are exchanged between the analyst and his patient.

Such thinking, of course, is as shortsighted as it is inconsistent. For these are the very persons who know with such certainty that the patients "merely imagine" their symptoms.

Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.

With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions.

Such thinking, of course, is as shortsighted as it is inconsistent. For these are the very persons who know with such certainty that the patients "merely imagine" their symptoms. Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.

With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions.

Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.

Since, however, one cannot attack an ostensibly objective result of scientific inquiry with such objections, the criticism must be translated to an intellectual level if it is to be voiced.

But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

Society thus brands what is unpleasant as untrue, denying the conclusions of psychoanalysis with logical and pertinent arguments. These arguments originate from affective sources, however, and society holds to these prejudices against all attempts at refutation.

… a criminal lawyer, and engaged in the investigation of a murder, do you actually expect the murderer to leave his photograph and address on the scene of the crime, or would you, of necessity, content yourself with fainter and less certain traces of that individual?

Therefore, let us not undervalue small signs; perhaps by means of them we will succeed in getting on the track of greater things.

I agree with you that the larger problems of the world and of science have the first claim on our interest. But it is generally of little avail to form the definite resolution to devote oneself to the investigation of this or that problem.

But it is generally of little avail to form the definite resolution to devote oneself to the investigation of this or that problem. Often one does not know in which direction to take the next step.

In scientific research it is more fruitful to attempt what happens to be before one at the moment and for whose investigation there is a discoverable method.

If one does that thoroughly without prejudice or predisposition, one may, with good fortune, and by virtue of the connection which links each thing to every other (hence also the small to the great) discover even from such modest research a point of approach to …

But are you not confounding, in your criticism, the sublimity of the problems with the conspicuousness of their manifestations?

Are there not very important things which under certain circumstances, and at certain times, can betray themselves only by very faint signs?

I could easily cite a great many instances of this kind. From what vague signs, for instance, do the young gentlemen of this audience conclude that they have won the favor of a lady?

For example, a professor says in his initial lecture, "I am not inclined to evaluate the merits of my predecessor."[6] Or another professor says, "In the case of the female genital, despite many temptations ... I mean many attempts ... etc."[7]

The most common, and also the most conspicuous form of slips of the tongue, however, is that of saying the exact opposite of what one meant to say.

In such cases, one goes far afield from the problem of sound relations and resemblance effects, and can cite, instead of these, the fact that opposites have an obviously close relationship to each other, and have particularly close relations in the psychology of association.

It could nevertheless really be a psychic accident, or meaningful only in very rare cases, and the poet would still retain the right to infuse it with meaning through his setting.

As to their poetic use, however, it would not be surprising if we should glean more information concerning slips of the tongue from the poet than from the philologist or the psychiatrist.

Such an example of a slip of the tongue occurs in Wallenstein (Piccolomini, Act 1, Scene 5).

But when you are confronted by the psychic fact that the subject, when questioned, had a certain idea, you will not accept that as valid, but say some other idea might just as easily have occurred to him!

The trouble is that you believe in the illusion of psychic freedom and will not give it up.

I regret that on this point I find myself in complete opposition to your views.

At law, one has to declare a defendant guilty on circumstantial evidence for practical reasons. We see no such necessity; but neither are we forced to forego the use of these circumstances.

It would be a mistake to believe that a science consists of nothing but conclusively proved theorems, and any such demand would be unjust.

Only a person with a mania for authority, a person who must replace his religious catechism with some other, even though it be scientific, would make such a demand. Science has but few apodeictic precepts in its catechism;

Science has but few apodeictic precepts in its catechism; it consists chiefly of assertions which it has developed to certain degrees of probability.

It is actually a symptom of scientific thinking if one is content with these approximations of certainty and is able to carry on constructive work despite the lack of the final confirmation.

But where do we get the facts for our interpretations, the circumstances for our proof, when the further remarks of the subject under analysis do not themselves elucidate the meaning of the error? From many sources.

We have already spoken in such detail of tongue slips, and yet there are still several points to be added. Linked with tongue slips are smaller effective phenomena which are not entirely without interest.

No one likes to make a slip of the tongue; often one fails to hear his own slip, though never that of another.

Tongue slips are in a certain sense infectious; it is not at all easy to discuss tongue slips without falling into slips of the tongue oneself.

In this way, whatever interests and preoccupies one puts itself in the place of that which is foreign or uninteresting.

The after-effects of thoughts blur the new perceptions.

There are other types of misreadings, in which the text itself arouses the disturbing tendency, by means of which it is then most often changed into its opposite. One reads something which is undesired;

Thus you see that one must always exercise restraint and caution in the application of interpretations, even though the interpretations are justified.

That which is psychologically equivalent may nevertheless in practice be very ambiguous.

Phenomena such as these will seem very unusual to you. Perhaps you are inclined to assume that the "indirect" antipathy is enough to characterize the incident as pathological. Yet I can assure you that it also occurs in a normal and healthy setting.

And finally, one cannot make so general an assertion as that the dream is an unimportant thing.

We know from our own experience that the mood in which one wakes up after a dream may continue throughout the whole day.

Cases have been observed by physicians in which a psychosis begins with a dream and holds to a delusion which originated in it. It is related of historical personages that they drew their inspiration for important deeds from dreams.

An old comparison makes the content of the dream analogous to the tones which the "ten fingers of a musically illiterate person would bring forth if they ran over the keys of the instrument."

Interpretation means finding a hidden meaning.

There can be no question of interpretation in such an estimation of the dream process. Look up the description of the dream in Wundt, Jodl and other newer philosophers.

At least we create for ourselves conditions quite similar to those obtaining at that time—warmth, darkness and the absence of stimuli. Some of us even roll ourselves into tight packages and assume in sleep a posture very similar to the intra-uterine posture.

It seems as if the world did not wholly possess us adults, it has only two-thirds of our life, we are still one-third unborn.

Each awakening in the morning is then like a new birth.

Some of us even roll ourselves into tight packages and assume in sleep a posture very similar to the intra-uterine posture. It seems as if the world did not wholly possess us adults, it has only two-thirds of our life, we are still one-third unborn.

Each awakening in the morning is then like a new birth.

We also speak of the condition after sleep with the words, "I feel as though I had been born anew," by which we probably form a very erroneous idea of the general feeling of the newly born.

Conversely, the child says, "I won't go to bed yet, I am not tired, I want to have some more fun." The biological intention of sleep thus seems to be recuperation; its psychological character, the suspension of interest in the external world.

Our relation to the world into which we came so unwillingly, seems to include the fact that we cannot endure it without interruption.

For this reason we revert from time to time to the pre-natal existence, that is, to the intra-uterine existence. At least we create for ourselves conditions quite similar to those obtaining at that time—warmth, darkness and the absence of stimuli.

Others, for example, the dreams of childhood, are so well preserved that they stay in the memory thirty years later, like fresh experiences.

Dreams, like individuals, may appear a single time, and never again, or they may repeat themselves unchanged in the same person, or with small variations.

In short, this nightly psychic activity can avail itself of an enormous repertoire, can indeed compass everything which the psychic accomplishes by day, but yet the two are not the same.

Let us, however, notice a peculiarity of dream life which becomes apparent in the study of these effects of stimuli.

The dream does not simply reproduce the stimulus, but it elaborates it, it plays upon it, places it in a sequence of relationships, replaces it with something else.

That is a side of dream activity which must interest us because it may lead us closer to the nature of the dream. If one does something under stimulation, then this stimulation need not exhaust the act.

They move with the time, so to speak, and receive from it a "time mark" which testifies to the influence of the new situation.

They are the raw material of poetic production, for out of his day dreams the poet, with certain transformations, disguises and omissions, makes the situations which he puts into his novels, romances and dramas.

The hero of the day dreams, however, is always the individual himself, either directly or by means of a transparent identification with another.

They are the raw material of poetic production, for out of his day dreams the poet, with certain transformations, disguises and omissions, makes the situations which he puts into his novels, romances and dramas.

The hero of the day dreams, however, is always the individual himself, either directly or by means of a transparent identification with another.

Perhaps day dreams bear this name because of the similarity of their relation to reality, in order to indicate that their content is as little to be taken for real as that of dreams.

Hence, we are justified in supposing that something of weight must be hidden behind the substitute. What other reason could there be for the difficulties which are maintained for purposes of concealment?

If a child does not want to open his clenched fist, he is certainly hiding something he ought not to have.

Just as soon as we bring the dynamic representation of resistance into our consideration of the case, we must realize that this factor is something quantitatively variable.

From this point we easily arrive at an explanation of the function of the dream. The dream, as a reaction to the psychic stimulus, must have the value of a release of this stimulus which results in its elimination and in the continuation of sleep.

We do not know how this release is made possible by the dream, but we note that the dream is not a disturber of sleep, as calumny says, but a guardian of sleep, whose duty it is to quell disturbances.

It is true, we think we would have slept better if we had not dreamt, but here we are wrong; as a matter of fact, we would not have slept at all without the help of the dream.

For there are also dreams of fear and dreams of embarrassing or indifferent content, but they have not been drawn into common usage. It is true that common usage recognizes "bad" dreams, but still the dream plainly connotates to it only the beautiful wish fulfillment.

There is indeed no proverb that tells us that the pig or the goose dreams of being slaughtered.

Of course it is unbelievable that the wish-fulfillment characteristic has not been noted by writers on the dream.

Yet where do you find a parallel for this state of affairs? In these times you need not seek far.

Take up any political paper and you will find that the text is obliterated here and there, and that in its place shimmers the white of the paper.

You know that that is the work of the newspaper censor. In these blank spaces something was printed which was not to the liking of the censorship authorities, and for that reason it was crossed out.

What difference does it make if the results of the dream interpretation seem unpleasant, even embarrassing and disgusting to you? "That doesn't prevent them from existing," as I used to hear my teacher Charcot say in similar cases, when I was a young doctor.

One must be humble, one must keep personal preferences and antipathies in the background, if one wishes to discover the realities of the world.

If a physicist can prove to you that the organic life of this planet must, within a short period of time, become completely extinct, do you also venture to say to him, "That cannot be so. This prospect is too unpleasant."

This prospect is too unpleasant." On the contrary, you will be silent until another physicist proves some error in the assumptions or calculations of the first.

If you reject the unpleasant, you are repeating the mechanism of dream construction instead of understanding and mastering it.

Perhaps you will promise to overlook the repulsive character of the censored dream-wishes, and will take refuge in the argument that it is improbable, after all, that so wide a field be given over to the evil in the constitution of man.

Are you ignorant of how uncontrolled and undependable the average human being is in all the affairs of sex life? Or do you not know that all the immoralities and excesses of which we dream nightly are crimes committed daily by waking persons?

What else does psychoanalysis do here but confirm the old saying of Plato, that the good people are those who content themselves with dreaming what the others, the bad people, really do?

And now turn your attention from the individual case to the great war devastating Europe. Think of the amount of brutality, the cruelty and the lies allowed to spread over the civilized world.

On the contrary, I show you not only the censored evil dream-wishes, but also the censor which suppresses them and renders them unrecognizable.

We dwell on the evil in mankind with greater emphasis only because others deny it, a method whereby the psychic life of mankind does not become better, but merely incomprehensible.

When, however, we give up this one-sided ethical estimate, we shall surely be able to find a more accurate formula for the relationship of the evil to the good in human nature.

the garden a frequent symbol of the female genitals. Fruit does not stand for the child, but for the breasts. Wild animals signify sensually aroused persons, or further, base impulses, passions. Blossoms and flowers represent the female genitals, or more particularly, virginity.

Do not forget that the blossoms are really the genitals of the plants.

We already know the room as a symbol. The representation may be extended in that the windows, entrances and exits of the room take on the meaning of the body openings.

… something quite unknown in the dream finds its counterpart in many of the creations of our imagination which fuse together component parts that do not belong together in experience, as for example the centaurs, and the fabulous animals of old mythology or of Boecklin's pictures.

For creative imagination can invent nothing new whatsoever, it can only put together certain details normally alien to one another.

The peculiar thing, however, about the procedure of the dream-work is the following: The material at the disposal of the dream-work consists of thoughts, thoughts which may be offensive and unacceptable, but which are nevertheless correctly formed and expressed.

The displacement of emphasis is unheard of as a means of expressing thoughts. In conscious thinking we occasionally admit it to gain a comic effect.

I can probably give you an idea of the confusion which this produces by reminding you of the story of the blacksmith who had committed a capital crime. The court decided that the penalty for the crime must be paid, but since he was the only blacksmith in the village and therefore indispensable, while there were three tailors, one of the latter was hung in his stead.

The third process of the dream-work is the most interesting from a psychological point of view. It consists of the translation of thoughts into visual images. Let us bear in mind that by no means all dream thoughts undergo this translation;

We already know the inversion of the sense, substitution by the opposite. Besides there are inversions of situations, of relations between two people, and so in dreams we are in a sort of topsy-turvy world.

In a dream it is frequently the rabbit that shoots the hunter.

Further inversion occurs in the sequence of events, so that in the dream the cause is placed after the effect. It is like a performance in a third-rate theatre, where the hero falls before the shot which kills him is fired from the wings.

In a dream it is frequently the rabbit that shoots the hunter. Further inversion occurs in the sequence of events, so that in the dream the cause is placed after the effect.

It is like a performance in a third-rate theatre, where the hero falls before the shot which kills him is fired from the wings.

Or there are dreams in which the whole sequence of the elements is inverted, so that in the interpretation one must take the last first, and the first last, in order to obtain a meaning.

I believe we have not laid enough stress on this fact.

The child is able to speak well at the age of two, it soon shows that it can become adjusted to the most complicated psychic situations, and makes remarks which years later are retold to it, but which it has itself entirely forgotten.

Besides, the memory in the early years is more facile, because it is less burdened than in later years. Nor is there any reason for considering the memory-function as a particularly high or difficult psychic performance;

Not until later does the love impulse become independent of egoism.

In brief, egoism has taught the child to love.

In this connection it is instructive to compare the child's regard for his brothers and sisters with that which he has for his parents. The little child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters, often, obviously, he does not love them at all.

But to be truthful, when we disclose in a dream the wish for the death of a mother or sister we need seldom find it puzzling and may trace its origin easily to early childhood, often enough, also, to the propinquity of later years.

Probably no nurseries are free from mighty conflicts among the inhabitants.

The motives are rivalry for the love of the parents, articles owned in common, the room itself. The hostile impulses are called forth by older as well as younger brothers and sisters. I believe it was Bernard Shaw who said:

Why do I speak of these things, so banal and so well known? Because there is an unmistakable disposition to deny their significance in life, and to set forth the ideal demanded by society as a fulfilled thing much oftener than it really is fulfilled.

But it is preferable for psychology to speak the truth, rather than that this task should be left to the cynic.

In any event, this denial refers only to actual life. The arts of narrative and dramatic poetry are still free to make use of the motives that result from a disturbance of this ideal.

I am convinced that the question again and again occurred to you: "What about wish-fulfillment, which ostensibly is the goal of dream-work?" This question is important. It was, in fact, the question of our lay-critics.

As you know, humanity has an instinctive antagonism toward intellectual novelties.

The expression of such a novelty should immediately be reduced to its narrowest limits, if possible, comprised in a commonplace phrase. Wish-fulfillment has become that phrase for the new dream-science. The layman asks: "Where is the wish-fulfillment?"

A second, far more important and more extensive consideration, equally disregarded by the layman, is the following:

A wish-fulfillment certainly must bring pleasure—but to whom?

Naturally, to him who has the wish. But we know from the dreamer that he stands in a very special relationship to his wishes. He casts them aside, censors them, he will have none of them.

Yet we are often able to remain asleep, even when the dream begins to become suspicious, and begins to assume the form of anxiety.

We say to ourselves in our sleep: "It's only a dream," and we sleep on.

When does it happen that the dream-wish is in a position to overpower this censorship? The conditions for this may be just as easily furnished by the dream-wish as by the dream-censorship. The wish may, for unknown reasons, become irresistible;

For, after all, these latter are really designed for communication, that is to say, they were always intended to be understood, no matter in what way and with what aids. But it is just this characteristic which the dream lacks.

The dream does not want to tell anyone anything, it is no vehicle of communication, it is, on the contrary, constructed so as not to be understood.

For that reason we must not be surprised or misled if we should discover that a number of the ambiguities and vagaries of the dream do not permit of determination.

In all of these cases, however, it is a question of matters which are to be hidden, which were intended for concealment; this is what the dream censor aims to do.

We must not expect to find a thing that has been concealed in its accustomed place in the spot where it belongs.

In this respect the Commissions for the Surveillance of Frontiers now in office are more cunning than the Swiss school authorities.

Do not, however, understand this as an announcement of dogmatic lectures which demand your unconditional belief. That would be a gross misunderstanding.

I do not wish to convince you. I am out to stimulate your interest and shake your prejudices.

If, in consequence of not knowing the facts, you are not in a position to judge, neither should you believe nor condemn. Listen and allow yourselves to be influenced by what I tell you. One cannot be so easily convinced;

I am out to stimulate your interest and shake your prejudices. If, in consequence of not knowing the facts, you are not in a position to judge, neither should you believe nor condemn. Listen and allow yourselves to be influenced by what I tell you.

One cannot be so easily convinced; at least if he comes by convictions without effort, they soon prove to be valueless and unable to hold their own.

He only has a right to conviction who has handled the same material for many years and who in so doing has gone through the same new and surprising experiences again and again. Why, in matters of intellect these lightning conversions, these momentary repulsions?

is not his latest assertion, as well, open to error? At the same time he who holds unswervingly to what he has once said, or cannot be made to give it up quickly enough, is called stubborn and biased.

In the face of these contradictory criticisms, what else can one do but be himself and act according to his own dictates?

That is what I have decided to do, and I will not allow myself to be restrained from modifying and adapting my theories as the progress of my experience demands.

Would you therefore assert that analysis is objectionable in such cases because it remains without result? I think not. We have the right, indeed we have the duty to pursue scientific research without regard to an immediate practical effect.

Some day, though we do not know when or where, every little scrap of knowledge will have been translated into skill, even into therapeutic skill.

If psychoanalysis were as unsuccessful in all other forms of nervous and psychological disease as it is in the case of the obsession, it would nevertheless remain fully justified as an irreplaceable method of scientific research.

On the whole it may be of small importance to us who is responsible for this discovery, for you know that every discovery is made more than once, that none is made all at once, and that success is not meted out according to deserts.

America is not named after Columbus.

Before Breuer and Janet, the great psychiatrist Leuret expressed the opinion that even for the deliria of the insane, if we only understood how to interpret them, a meaning could be found.

He has only one remedy—to transfer and change. In place of one stupid idea he can think of a somewhat milder absurdity, he can proceed from one precaution and prohibition to another, or carry through another ceremonial.

He may shift, but he cannot annul the compulsion.

One of the chief characteristics of the sickness is the instability of the symptoms; they can be shifted very far from their original form. It is moreover striking that the contrasts present in all psychological experience are so very sharply drawn in this condition.

The characterization is obviously too general. One may even doubt whether it is at all justified, when one learns that such symptoms occur in excellent men and women of especially great and universally recognized ability.

In general we glean very little intimate knowledge of the great men who serve us as models.

This is due both to their own discretion and to the lying propensities of their biographers.

In their dreams these patients regularly live over the traumatic situation; where there are attacks of an hysterical type, which permit of an analysis, we learn that the attack approximates a complete transposition into this situation.

It is as if these patients had not yet gotten through with the traumatic situation, as if it were actually before them as a task which was not yet mastered.

We take this view of the matter in all seriousness; it shows the way to an economic view of psychic occurrences. For the expression "traumatic" has no other than an economic meaning, and the disturbance permanently attacks the management of available energy.

If only that were all! We have made discoveries for which we were at first unprepared.

Knowing and knowing is not always the same thing; there are various kinds of knowing that are psychologically by no means comparable.

"Il y a fagots et fagots,"[39] as Molière says. The knowledge of the physician is not the same as that of the patient and cannot bring about the same results.

Do I not confuse you by so often retracting my words and restricting them, spinning out trains of thought and then rejecting them? I should be sorry if this were the case.

However, I strongly dislike simplification at the expense of truth, and am not averse to having you receive the full impression of how many-sided and complicated the subject is.

I also think that there is no harm done if I say more on every point than you can at the moment make use of.

I also think that there is no harm done if I say more on every point than you can at the moment make use of.

I know that every hearer and reader arranges what is offered him in his own thoughts, shortens it, simplifies it and extracts what he wishes to retain.

Within a given measure it is true that the more we begin with the more we have left.

This re-valuation, under the influence of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, was not accomplished without the most violent opposition of their contemporaries.

But the third and most irritating insult is flung at the human mania of greatness by present-day psychological research, which wants to prove to the "I" that it is not even master in its own home, but is dependent upon the most scanty information concerning all that goes on unconsciously in its psychic life.

We psychoanalysts were neither the first, nor the only ones to announce this admonition to look within ourselves.

How improbable this assertion must sound! And yet it is so, and if we are reproached with its improbability, we need only answer that this fact is not without its analogies.

Whoever goes to a dentist with an unbearable toothache may very well find himself thrusting away the dentist's arm when the man makes for his sick tooth with a pair of pincers.

The resistance which the patient shows is highly varied, exceedingly subtle, often difficult to recognize, Protean-like in its manifold changes of form. It means that the doctor must become suspicious and be constantly on his guard against the patient.

It is a veritable tempest in a teapot. Still the patient can be argued with, he is anxious to persuade us to instruct him, to teach him, to lead him to the literature, so that he may continue working things out for himself.

He is very ready to become an adherent of psychoanalysis on condition that analysis spare him personally.

But we recognize this curiosity as a resistance, as a diversion from our special objects, and we meet it accordingly. In those patients who suffer from compulsion neuroses, we must expect the resistance to display special tactics.

Thus his criticism is not an independent function to be respected as such; it plays the role of handy-man to his emotional attitude and is guided by his resistance.

If something displeases him, he can defend himself against it very ingeniously and appear most critical. But if something strikes his fancy, then he may show himself easily convinced.

Perhaps none of us are very different, and the patient under analysis shows this dependence of the intellect on the emotional life so plainly only because, under the analysis, he is so hard pressed.

The child is supposed to be pure and innocent, and whoever says otherwise may be condemned as a shameless blasphemer of the tender and sacred feelings of humanity.

The children are the only ones who do not join in carrying out these conventions, who assert their animal rights, who prove again and again that the road to purity is still before them.

It is strange that those who deny the sexuality of children, do not therefore slacken in their educational efforts but rather punish severely the manifestations of the very thing they maintain does not exist, and call it "childish naughtiness."

The answer which the nursery has ready for the child, that the stork brings children, is doubted far more frequently than we imagine, even by very young children.

The feeling that he has been cheated out of the truth by grown-ups, contributes greatly to the child's sense of solitude and to his independent development.

But the child is not capable of solving this problem unaided. His undeveloped sexual constitution restricts his ability to understand. At first he assumes that children are produced by a special substance in one's food and does not know that only women can bear children.

In spite of these efforts, you are guilty, for you have not been able to destroy the criminal purposes, they will persist unconsciously in you." And in that there is psychological truth.

Even if man has relegated his evil impulses to the unconscious, and would tell himself that he is no longer answerable for them, he will still be compelled to experience this responsibility as a feeling of guilt which he cannot trace to its source.

It is not to be doubted for a moment that one may recognize in the Oedipus-complex one of the most important sources for the consciousness of guilt with which neurotics are so often harassed.

I seize the opportunity to warn you of taking sides in a most unnecessary conflict.

In scientific affairs it is a popular proceeding to emphasize a part of the truth in place of the whole truth and to combat all the rest, which has lost none of its verity, in the name of that fraction.

In this way various factions have already separated out from the movement of psychoanalysis;

Educators know this and act accordingly; but perhaps the results of psychoanalysis will influence them to transfer the greatest emphasis to the education of the early years, of childhood, beginning with the suckling.

The little human being is frequently a finished product in his fourth or fifth year, and only reveals gradually in later years what has long been ready within him.

To appreciate the full significance of the aforementioned difference between the two groups of instincts, we must digress considerably and introduce a consideration which we must needs call economic.

I myself believe that I could have proceeded differently, to your better advantage, and this indeed had been my intention. But one cannot always carry out one's sensible intentions.

The nature of the subject matter issues its own commands, and easily modifies our plans.

Even so usual a performance as the organization of well-known material is not entirely subject to the particular purposes of the author. It forms itself as it will and later one wonders why it turned out so and not otherwise.

Do not be surprised, then, to learn that occasionally even the physician takes the part of the illness he is battling against. He does not have to restrict himself to the role of the fanatic warrior for health in all situations of life.

He knows that the world contains not only neurotic misery, but also real, incurable suffering.

He knows that necessity may even require a human being to sacrifice his health, and he learns that by this sacrifice on the part of one individual untold wretchedness may be spared for many others.

It may be due to the fact that the settlement of the conflict through symptom development is nevertheless an automatic process, not able to meet the demands of life, and for whose sake man renounces the use of his best and loftiest powers.

If it were possible to choose, it were indeed best to perish in an honorable struggle with destiny.

I still owe you further explanation as to why, in my presentation of the theory of neurosis, I did not proceed from ordinary nervousness as a starting point.

At other times superior knowledge promulgates fear, because it recognizes the danger earlier.

The savage, for instance, will recoil before a footprint in the woods, meaningless to the uninstructed, which reveals to him the proximity of an animal of prey; the experienced sailor will notice a little cloud, which tells him of a coming hurricane, with terror, while to the passenger it seems insignificant.

After further consideration, we must say to ourselves that the verdict on real fear, whether it be rational or purposeful, must be thoroughly revised.

Fright, on the other hand, seems really to possess a special meaning, which emphasizes the effects of a danger which is precipitated without any expectance or readiness of fear.

Thus we might say that anxiety protects man from fright.

You have probably noticed the ambiguity and vagueness in the use of the word "anxiety." Generally one means a subjective condition, caused by the perception that an "evolution of fear" has been consummated. Such a condition may be called an emotion.

We call this condition "expectant fear" or "anxious expectation."

Persons who suffer from this sort of fear always prophesy the most terrible of all possibilities, interpret every coincidence as an evil omen, and ascribe a dreadful meaning to all uncertainty.

Many persons who cannot be termed ill show this tendency to anticipate disaster. We blame them for being over-anxious or pessimistic.

In hysteric conditions of fear, its unconscious correlative may be either an impulse of similar character, such as fear, shame, embarrassment or positive libidinous excitation, or hostile and aggressive emotion such as fury or rage.

Fear then is the common currency for which all emotional impulses can be exchanged, provided that the idea with which it has been associated has been subject to suppression.

3. Patients suffering from compulsive acts are remarkably devoid of fear. They yield us the data for our third point.

Suppression corresponds to the ego's flight from the libido, which it regards dangerous. The phobia is comparable to a fortification against outer danger, which is represented by the much feared libido.

The weakness of the phobias' system of defense lies in the fact that the fort has been strengthened from without and has remained vulnerable within.

The projection of peril from the libido into the environment is never very successful. In other neuroses, therefore, other systems of defense are used against the possibility of fear development. That is an interesting aspect of the psychology of neurosis.

Since we are so near the end you certainly will be glad to hear the psychoanalytic explanation of a maniacal idea. But I have less to say about it than you expect.

The maniacal idea as well as the compulsion idea cannot be assailed by logical arguments or actual experience.

This is explained by their relation to the unconscious, which is represented by the maniacal idea or the compulsion idea, and held down by whichever is effective. The difference between the two is based upon respective localization and dynamic relations of the two conditions.

… true, only observers, but we cannot help observing with critical eyes, and we have found it impossible to take the part of conventional sex morality, or to estimate highly the way in which society has tried to regulate the problems of sexual life in practice.

We can prove to society mathematically that its code of ethics has exacted more sacrifices than is its worth, and that its procedure rests neither on veracity nor wisdom.

We cannot spare our patients the task of listening to this criticism. We accustom them to weigh sexual matters, as well as others, without prejudice;

Secondly, there are the hostile instead of the tender impulses. The hostile feelings generally appear later than the affectionate impulses or succeed them. When they occur simultaneously they exemplify the ambivalence of emotions which exists in most of the intimate relations between all persons.

The hostile feelings connote an emotional attachment just as do the affectionate impulses, just as defiance signifies dependence as well as does obedience, although the activities they call out are opposed.

We cannot doubt but that the hostile feelings toward the physician deserve the name of transference, since the situation which the treatment creates certainly could not give sufficient cause for their origin.

Without transference of this sort, or without a negative transfer, he would not even listen to the physician and to his arguments.

Faith repeats the history of its own origin; it is a derivative of love and at first requires no arguments.

When they are offered by a beloved person, arguments may later be admitted and subjected to critical reflection. Arguments without such support avail nothing, and never mean anything in life to most persons.