1910 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 17

cure the symptom must be traced back over the same
route to the repressed idea. If this repressed material
is once more made part of the conscious mental
functions—a process which supposes the overcoming
of considerable resistance—the psychic conflict
which then arises, the same which the patient wished
to avoid, is made capable of a happier termination,
under the guidance of the physician, than is offered
by repression. There are several possible suitable
decisions which can bring conflict and neurosis to a
happy end; in particular cases the attempt may be
made to combine several of these. Either the per-
sonality of the patient may be convinced that he has
been wrong in rejecting the pathogenic wish, and he
may be made to accept it either wholly or in part;
or this wish may itself be directed to a higher goal
which is free from objection, by what is called
sublimation; or the rejection may be recognized as
rightly motivated, and the automatic and therefore
insufficient mechanism of repression be reinforced
by the higher, more characteristically human mental
faculties; one succeeds in mastering his wishes by
conscious thought.

Forgive me if I have not been able to present more
clearly these main points of the treatment which is
to-day known as “ psycho-analysis ". The difficulties
do not lie merely in the newness of the subject.

Regarding the nature of the unacceptable wishes,
which succeed in making their influence felt out of
the unconscious, in spite of repression; and regarding
the question of what subjective and constitutional
factors must be present for such a failure of repression
and such a surrogate or symptom creation to take
place, we will speak in later remarks.

Third Lecture. , . . In the patients whom I treated

18 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 1910

there were two opposing forces: on the one hand the
conscious striving to drag up into consciousness the
forgotten experience which was present in the uncon-
scious; and on the other hand the resistance which
we have seen, which set itself against the emergence
of the suppressed idea or its associates into conscious-
ness. In cases where this resistance was non-existent
or very slight, the forgotten material could become
conscious without disguise. It was then a natural
supposition that the disguise would be the more com-
plete, the greater the resistance to the emergence of
the idea. Thoughts which broke into the patient’s
consciousness instead of the ideas sought for, were
accordingly made up just like symptoms; they were
new, artificial, ephemeral surrogates for the repressed
ideas, and differed from these just in proportion as
they had been more completely disguised under the
influence of the resistances. These surrogates must,
however, show a certain similarity with the ideas
which are the object of our search, by virtue of their
nature as symptoms; and when the resistance is not
too intensive it is possible from the nature of these
irruptions to discover the hidden object of our search.
This must be related to the repressed thought as a
sort of allusion, as a statement of the same things in
indirect terms.

We know cases in normal psychology in which
analogous situations to the one which we have
assumed give rise to similar experiences. Such a case
is that of wit. By my study of psycho-analytic tech-
nique I was necessarily led to a consideration of the
problem of the nature of wit. I will give one example
of this sort, which, too, is a story that originally
appeared in English.

The anecdote runs: “Two unscrupulous business

1910 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 19

men had succeeded by fortunate speculations in
accumulating a large fortune, and then directed their
efforts to breaking into good society. Among other
means they thought it would be of advantage to be
painted by the most famous and expensive artist of
the city, a man whose paintings were considered as
events. The costly paintings were first shown at a
great soirée and both hosts led the most influential
connoisseur and art critic to the wall of the salon on
which the portraits were hung, to elicit his admiring
judgment. The artist looked for a long time, looked
about as though in search of something, and then
merely asked, pointing out the vacant space between
the two pictures: “And where is the Saviour?”*...

We understand that the critic means to say: “ You
are a couple of malefactors, like those between whom
the Saviour was crucified ". But he does not say this,
he expresses himself instead in a way that at first
seems not to the purpose and not related to the
matter in hand, but which at the next moment we
recognize as an allusion to the insult at which he aims,
andasa perfect surrogate for it. We cannot expect to
find in the case of wit all those relations that our
theory supposes for the origin of the irruptive ideas
of our patients, but it is my desire to lay stress on the
similar motivation of wit and irruptive idea. Why
does not the critic say directly what he has to say to
the two rogues ? Because in addition to his desire to
say it straight out, he is actuated by strong opposite
motives. It is a proceeding which is liable to be
dangerous to offend people who are one’s hosts, and
who can call to their aid the strong arms of numerous
servants. . . . On this ground the critic does not
express the particular insult directly, but in a dis-
guised form, as an allusion with omission. The same

20 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 1910

constellation comes into play, according to our
hypothesis, when our patient produces the irruptive
idea as a surrogate for the forgotten idea which is
the object of the quest. . . .

It is very useful to designate a group of ideas which
belong together and have a common emotive tone,
according to the custom of the Zurich school
(Bleuler, Jung and others), as a ‘complex’. So
we can say that if we set out from the last memories
of the patient to look for a repressed complex, that
we have every prospect of discovering it, if only the
patient will communicate to us a sufficient number of
the ideas which come into his head. So we let the
patient speak along any line that he desires, and
cling to the hypothesis that nothing can occur to him
except what has some indirect bearing on the
complex that we are seeking. If this method of dis-
covering the repressed complexes seems too circum-
stantial, I can at least assure you that it is the only
available one.

In practising this technique, one is further bothered
by the fact that the patient often stops, is at a stand-
still, and considers that he has nothing to say;
nothing occurs to him. If this were really the case
and the patient were right, our procedure would
again be proven inapplicable. Closer observation
shows that such an absence of ideas never really
occurs, and that it only appears to when the patient
holds back or rejects the ideas which he perceives,
under the influence of the resistance, which dis-
guises itself as critical judgment of the value of the
idea. The patient can be protected from this if he is
warned in advance of this circumstance, and told to
take no account of the critical attitude. He must say
anything that comes into his mind, fully laying aside

1910 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 21

such critical choice, even though he may think it
unessential, irrelevant, nonsensical, especially when
the idea is one which is unpleasant to dwell on. By fol-
lowing this prescription we secure the material which
sets us on the track of the repressed complex. . . ・

This method of work with whatever comes into the
patient’s head when he submits to psycho-analytic
treatment, is not the only technical means at our
disposal for the widening of consciousness. Two
other methods of procedure serve the same purpose,
the interpretation of his dreams and the evaluation
of acts which he bungles or does without intending
toj
You must remember that our nightly dream pro-
ductions show the greatest outer similarity and inner
relationship to the creations of the insane, but on the
other hand are compatible with full health during
waking life. It does not sound at all absurd to say
that whoever regards these normal sense illusions,
these delusions and alterations of character as matter
for amazement instead of understanding, has not the
least prospect of understanding the abnormal crea-
tions of diseased mental states in any other than the
lay sense. . . .

In our waking state we usually treat dreams with
as little consideration as the patient treats their irrup-
tive ideas which the psycho-analyst demands from
him. It is evident that we reject them, for we forget
them quickly and completely. The slight valuation
which we place on them is based, with those dreams
that are not confused and nonsensical, on the feeling
that they are foreign to our personality. . . . [But]
not all dreams are so foreign to the character of the
dreamer, are incomprehensible and confused. Ifyou
will undertake to consider the dreams of young

22 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 1910

children from the age of a year and a half on, you
will find them quite simple and easy to interpret.
The young child always dreams of the fulfilment of.
wishes which were aroused in him the day before
and were not satisfied. You need no art of interpreta-
tion to discover this simple solution, you only need
to inquire into the experiences of the child on the
day before (the " dream day"). Now it would cer-
tainly be a most satisfactory solution of the dream-
riddle, if the dreams of adults, too, were the same as
those of children, fulfilments of wishes which had
been aroused in them during the dream day. This is
actually the fact; the difficulties which stand in the
way of this solution can be removed step by step
by a thorough analysis of the dream.

There is, first of all, the most weighty objection,
that the dreams of adults generally have an incom-
prehensible content, which shows wish-fulfilment
least of anything. The answer is this: these dreams
have undergone a process of disguise, the psychic
content which underlies them was originally meant
for quite different verbal expression. You must
differentiate between the manifest dream-content, which
we remember in the morning only confusedly, and
with difficulty clothe in words which seem arbitrary,
and the latent dream-thoughts, whose presence in the
unconscious we must assume. This distortion of the
dream is the same process which has been revealed
to you in the investigations of the creations (symp-
toms) of hysterical subjects; it points to the fact that
the same opposition of psychic forces has its share in
the creation of dreams as in the creation of symptoms.

The manifest dream-content is the disguised surro-
gate for the unconscious dream thoughts, and this
disguising is the work of the defensive forces of the

1910 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 23

ego, of the resistances. These prevent the repressed
wishes from entering consciousness during the waking
life, and even in the relaxation of sleep they are still
strong enough to force them to hide themselves by a
sort of masquerading. The dreamer, then, knows
just as little the sense of his dream as the hysterical
knows the relation and significance of his symptoms.
That there are latent dream-thoughts and that
between them and the manifest dream-content there
exists the relation just described—of this you may
convince yourselves by the analysis of dreams, a
procedure the technique of which is exactly that of
psycho-analysis. You must abstract entirely from
the apparent connection of the elements in the mani-
fest dream and seek for the irruptive ideas which
arise through free association, according to the
psycho-analytic laws, from each separate dream-
element. From this material the latent dream-
thoughts may be discovered, exactly as one divines
the concealed complexes of the patient from the
fancies connected with his symptoms and memories.
From the latent dream thoughts which you will find
in this way, you will see at once how thoroughly
justified one is in interpreting the dreams of adults
by the same rubrics as those of children. What is
now substituted for the manifest dream-content is
the real sense of the dream, is always clearly compre-
hensible, associated with the impressions of the day
before, and appears as the fulfilling of an unsatisfied
wish. The manifest dream, which we remember
after waking, may then be described as a disguised
fulfilment of repressed wishes.

It is also possible by a sort of synthesis to get some
insight into the process which has brought about the
disguise of the unconscious dream thoughts as the

0

24 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 1910

manifest dream-content. We call this process
“ dream-work '. This deserves our fullest theoretical
interest, since here as nowhere else we can study the
unsuspected psychic processes which are existent in
the unconscious, or, to express it more exactly,
between two such separate systems as the conscious
and the unconscious. Among these newly discovered
psychic processes, two, condensation and displace-
ment, or transvaluation, change of psychic accent,
stand out most prominently. Dream-work is a
special case of the reaction of different mental
groupings on each other, and as such is the conse-
quence of psychic fission. In all essential points it
seems identical with the work of disguise, which
changes the repressed complex in the case of failing
repression into symptoms.

You will furthermore discover by the analysis of
dreams, most convincingly your own, the unsus-
pected importance of the réle which impressions and
experiences from early childhood exert on the
development of men. In the dream life the child, as
it were, continues his existence in the man, with a
retention of all his traits and wishes, including those
which he was obliged to allow to fall into disuse in
his later years. With irresistible might it will be
impressed on you by what processes of development,
of repression, sublimation and reaction there arises
out of the child, with its peculiar gifts and tendencies,
the so-called normal man, the bearer and partly the
victim of our painfully acquired civilization. I will
also direct your attention to the fact that we have
discovered from the analysis of dreams that the un-
conscious makes use of a sort of symbolism, especially
in the presentation of sexual complexes. This
symbolism in part varies with the individual, but in

1910 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 25

part is of a typical nature, and seems to be identical
with the symbolism which we suppose to lie behind

- our myths and legends. It is not impossible that
these latter creations of the people may find their
explanation from the study of dreams.

Finally I must remind you that you must not be led
astray by the objection that the occurrence of anxiety-
dreams, contradicts our idea of the dream as a wish-
fulfilment. Apart from the consideration that
anxiety-dreams also require interpretation before
judgment can be passed on them, one can say quite
generally that the anxiety does not depend in such a
simple way on the dream content as one might
suppose without more knowledge of the facts, and
more attention to the conditions of neurotic anxiety.
Anxiety is one of the ways in which the ego relieves
itself of repressed wishes which have become too
strong, and so is easy to explain in the dream, if the
wish has gone too far towards the fulfilling of the
objectionable wish. . . .

I may now pass to that group of everyday mental
phenomena whose study has become a technical
help for psycho-analysis. These are the bungling of
acts [parapraxes] among normal men as well as
among neurotics, to which no significance is ordi-
narily attached; the forgetting of things which one
is supposed to know and at other times really does
know (for example the temporary forgetting of
proper names); mistakes in speaking, which occur
so frequently; analogous mistakes in writing and in
reading; the automatic execution of purposive
acts in wrong situations and the loss or breaking of
objects, etc. These are trifles for which no one has
ever sought a psychological determination, which
have passed unchallenged as chance experiences, as

26 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 1910

consequences of absent-mindedness, inattention and
similar conditions. Here, too, are included the acts
and gestures executed without being noticed by the
subject, to say nothing of the fact that he attaches
no psychic importance to them; as playing and
trifling with objects, humming melodies, handling
one's person and clothing and the like."

These little things, the bungling of acts, like the
symptomatic and chance acts are not so entirely
without meaning as is generally supposed by a sort of
tacit agreement. They have a meaning, generally
easy and sure to interpret from the situation in
which they occur, and it can be demonstrated that
they either express impulses and purposes which are
repressed, hidden if possible from the consciousness
of the individual, or that they spring from exactly
the same sort of repressed wishes and complexes
which we have learned to know already as the
creators of symptoms and dreams.

It follows that they deserve the rank of symptoms,
and their observation, like that of dreams, can lead
to the discovery of the hidden complexes of the
psychic life. With their help one will usually betray
the most intimate of his secrets. If these occur so
easily and commonly among people in health, with
whom repression has on the whole succeeded fairly
well, this is due to their insignificance and their
inconspicuous nature. But they can lay claim to
high theoretic value, for they prove the existence
of repression and surrogate creations even under the
conditions of health. You have already noticed
that the psycho-analyst is distinguished by an
especially strong belief in the determination of the
psychic life. For him there is in the expressions of

1 See The Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life.

1910 THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 27

the psyche nothing trifling, nothing arbitrary and
lawless. . . .

Fourth Lecture. . . . Psycho-analytic investigations
trace back the symptoms of disease with really
surprising regularity to impressions from the sexual
life, show us that the pathogenic wishes are of the
nature of erotic impulse-components, and necessitate
the assumption that to disturbances of the erotic
sphere must be ascribed the greatest significance
among the etiological factors of the disease. This
holds of both sexes. I know that this assertion will
not willingly be credited. Even those investigators
who gladly follow my psychological labours, are
inclined to think that I overestimate the ætiological
share of the sexual factors. They ask me why other
mental excitations should not lead to the phenomena
of repression and surrogate-creation which I have
described. I can give them this answer; that I do
not know why they should not do this, I have no
objection to their doing it, but experience shows
that they do not possess such a significance, and that
they merely support the effect of the sexual factors,
without being able to supplant them. . . .

The conduct of the patients does not make it any
easier to convince one’s self of the correctness of the
view which I have expressed. Instead of willingly
giving us information concerning their sexual life,
they try to conceal it by every means in their power.
Men generally are not candid in sexual matters.
They do not show their sexuality freely, but they
wear a thick overcoat—a fabric of lies—to conceal
it, as though it were bad weather in the world of
sex. And they are not wrong; sun and wind are
not favourable in our civilized society to any demon-
stration of sex life. In truth no one can freely disclose