Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/243

 we have no reasons for assuming that the unconscious follows other laws than those which apply to conscious thought. The unconscious, like the conscious, gathers itself about the biological problems and endeavours to find solutions for these by analogy with what has gone before, just as much as the conscious does. Whenever we wish to assimilate something that is unknown, we arrive at it by a process of comparison. A simple example of this is the well-known fact that, when America was discovered by the Spaniards, the Indians took the horses of the conquerors, which were strange to them, for large pigs, because pigs were familiar to their experience. This is the mental process which we always employ in recognising unknown things; and this is the essential reason for the existence of symbolism. It is a process of comprehension by means of analogy. The apparently repressed desires, contained in the dream, are volitional tendencies which serve as language-material for subconscious expression. So far as this particular point is concerned, I am in full accord with the views of Adler, another member of Freud’s school. With reference to the fact that subconscious materials of expression are volitional elements, or tendencies, I may say that this is dependent upon the archaic nature of dream thinking, a problem with which I have already dealt in previous researches.

Owing to our different conception of the structure of the dream, the further course of analysis also gains a different complexion from that which it had until now. The symbolic valuation given to sexual phantasies in the later stages of analysis necessarily leads less to the reduction of the patient’s personality into primitive tendencies, than to the extension and further development of his mental attitude; that is, it tends to make his thinking richer and deeper, thus giving him what has always been one of the most powerful weapons that a human being can have in his struggle to adapt himself to life. By following this new course logically, I have come to the conclusion that these religious and philosophical motive forces—the so-called metaphysical needs of the human