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 patient’s psyche that he can see the true relationships and, without any preconceived plan of the analyst’s, can himself draw the right conclusions and apply them to his future life. This new life will betake itself along the line of least resistance—or should we not rather say, the least resistances, as a “compromise with all the necessities,” in a just balancing of pleasure and unpleasure? It is not we who must arbitrarily seek to determine how matters stand for the patient and what will benefit him; his own nature decides. In other words, we must assume the rôle of the accoucheur who can bring out into the light of day a child already alive, but who must avoid a series of mistakes if the child is to remain able to live and the mother is not to be injured. All this is very clear to me, since it is only the application to the psychoanalytic method of a general principle which should have universal validity: never do violence to Nature. Hence I also see that the psychoanalyst must follow his patient’s apparently “wrong roads” if the patient is ever to arrive at his own convictions and be freed once and for all from infantile reliance on authority. We ourselves as individuals have learnt, or can only learn, by making mistakes, how to avoid them for the future, and mankind as a whole has created the conditions of its present and future stages of development quite as much by frequent travel along wrong paths as along the right road. Have not many neurotics—I do not know if you will agree, but I think so—become ill partly for the very reason that their infantile faith in authority has fallen to pieces? Now they stand before the wreckage of their faith, weeping over it, in dire distress because they cannot find a substitute which shall show them clearly whither their life’s course should now turn. So they remain stuck fast betwixt infancy which they must unwillingly renounce, and the serious duties of the present and future (the moral conflict). I see, particularly in such cases, you are right in saying it is a mistake to seek to replace the lost faith in authority by another similar faith, certain to be useful only so long as the belief lasted. This applies to the deliberate use of suggestion in psychoanalysis, and the building upon