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 have been put forth here and there inside the psychoanalytic movement.

So the line of least resistance does not signify eo ipso the avoidance of unpleasure so much as the just balancing of unpleasure and pleasure. Painful activity by itself leads to no result but exhaustion. Man must be able to take pleasure in his life, or the struggle of life has no reward. What direction the patient’s future life should take is not ours to judge. We must not imagine we know better than his own nature—or we prove ourselves educators of the worst kind. Psychoanalysis is but a means of removing stones from the path, and in no way a method (as hypnotism often pretends to be) of putting anything into the patient which was not there before. So we renounce any attempt to give a direction, and occupy ourselves only with setting in proper relief all that analysis brings into the light of day, in order that the patient may see clearly, and be in a position to draw the appropriate conclusions. Anything that he has not himself won, he does not in the long run believe in; and all that he has received from authority keeps him still infantile. He must rather be put in such a position as will enable him to take control of his own life. It is the art of the psychoanalyst to follow the patient’s apparently mistaken paths without prejudice, and thus to discover his strayed and separated sheep. Working on a system, according to a preconceived scheme, we spoil the best results of the analysis. So I hold fast to the maxim you quote from me: “Every interference on the part of the analyst is a gross mistake in technique. So-called chance is the law and the order of psychoanalysis.”

You surely recognise that the schoolmaster-view never releases us from the attempt to correct Nature and the desire to force upon her our limited “truths.” In nerve-therapy we get so many wonderful experiences—unforeseen and impossible to foresee—that surely we ought to dismiss all hope of being infallibly able to point out the right path. The roundabout way and even the wrong way are necessary. If you deny this you must also deny that the errors in the