Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/130

116 associations that he once really had this thought. During the analysis I make it a point of holding the value of an emerging reminiscence independent of the patient's recognition. I am not tired of repeating that we are obliged to accept everything that we bring to light with our means. Should there be anything unreal or incorrect in the material thus revealed, the connection will later teach us to separate it. I may add that I rarely ever have occasion to subsequently withdraw the recognition from a reminiscence which I had preliminarily admitted. In spite of the deceptive appearance of an urgent contradiction, whatever came to the surface finally proved itself correct.

Those ideas which originate in the deepest layer, and from the nucleus of the pathogenic organization, are only with the greatest difficulty recognized by the patient as reminiscences. Even after everything is accomplished, when the patients are overcome by the logical force and are convinced of the curative effect accompanying the emerging of this idea—I say even if the patients themselves assume that they have thought "so" and "so" they often add, "but to recall, that I have thought so, I cannot." One readily comes to an understanding with them by saying that these were unconscious thoughts. But how should we note this state of aft'airs in our own psychological views? Should we pay no heed to the patient's demurring recognition which has no motive after the work has been completed ; should we assume that it was really a question of thoughts which never occurred, and for which there is only a possibility of existence so that the therapy would consist in the consummation of a psychic act which at that time never took place? It is obviously impossible to state anything about it, that is, to state anything concerning the condition of the pathogenic material previous to the analysis, before one has thoroughly explained his psychological views especially concerning the essence of consciousness. It is a fact worthy of reflection that in such analyses one can follow a stream of thought from the conscious into the unconscious (that is, absolutely not recognized as a reminiscence) thence draw it for some distance through the consciousness, and again see it end in the unconscious; and still this variation of the psychic elucidation would change nothing in it, in its logicalness, and in a single part of its connection. Should I then have this stream of thought freely before me, I could not