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 of incestuous cohabitation is by no means an “undisguised” content, but a dream as freshly symbolic and capable of analysis as all others. You surely only reach the paradoxical view that such a dream is “undisguised” if you are pledged to the sexual theory of neurosis.

That the patient may mislead the doctor for a longer or shorter time by means of deliberate deception and misrepresentation is possible; just as occasionally happens in all other departments of medicine. Therewith the patient injures himself most, since he has to pay for every deception or suppression, with aggravated or additional symptoms. Deceptions are so obviously disadvantageous to himself that in the end he can scarcely avoid the definite relinquishment of such a course.

The technique of analysis we can best postpone for oral discussion.

IX

From Dr. Loÿ. 23rd February, 1913.

your letter of 16th February I want first to single out the end, where you so admirably assign to its proper place the power of suggestion in psychoanalysis: “The patient is no empty sack, into which you can cram what you will; he brings his own predetermined content with him, with which one has always to reckon afresh.” With this I fully agree, my own experience confirms it. And you add: “This content remains untouched by involuntary analytical suggestion, but its form is altered, proteus-fashion, beyond measure.” So it becomes a matter of a sort of “mimicry” by which the patient seeks to escape the analyst, who is driving him into a corner and therefore for the moment seems to him an enemy. Until at last, through the joint work of patient and analyst—the former spontaneously yielding up his psychic content, the latter only interpreting and explaining—the analysis succeeds in bringing so much light into the darkness of the