Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/197

Rh with me could not refrain from remarking that this decline must have been due to the psychotherapy. I am quite convinced that he would have been more critical under different conditions.

(f) In conclusion, gentlemen, I must say to myself that it will not do to lay claim to your attention so long in favor of the analytic psychotherapy without telling you of what this treatment consists, and on what it is based. To be sure I can only indicate it as I have to be brief. This therapy is founded on the understanding that unconscious ideas—or rather the unconsciousness of certain psychic processes—are the main causes of a morbid symptom. We share this conviction with the French school (Janet) which moreover by gross schematization reduces the hysterical symptom to an unconscious idee fixe. Do not fear now that we will thus merge too far into the obscurest philosophy. Our unconscious is not quite the same as that of the philosophers and what is more, most philosophers wish to know nothing of the "psychical unconscious." But if you will put yourselves in our -position, you will understand that the interpretation of this unconscious, in patients' psychic life, into the conscious, must result in a correction of their deviation from the normal, and in an abrogation of the compulsion controlling their psychic life. For the conscious will reaches as far as the conscious psychic processes and every psychic compulsion is substantiated by the unconscious. You need never fear that the patient will be harmed by the emotion produced in the entrance of his unconscious into consciousness, for you can theoretically readily understand that the somatic and affective activity of the emotion which became conscious can never become as great as those of the unconscious. For we only control all our emotions by directing upon them our highest psychic activities which are connected with consciousness.

We can still choose another point of view for the understanding of the psychoanalytic treatment. The revealing and interpreting of the unconscious takes place under constant resistance on the part of the patient. The emerging of the unconscious is connected with displeasure and owing to this displeasure it is continuously repulsed by the patient. It is upon this conflict in the patient's psychic life that you encroach, and if you succeed in prevailing upon him to accept something, for motives of better