Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/222

208 covers himself and tells the patient, and of the elaboration of that which he heard from the patient. For the mechanism of our treatment is really very easy to grasp. We give the patient the conscious expected ideas through the model of which he is enabled to find in himself the unconscious ones. This is the intellectual help which facilitates for him the overcoming of the resistance between the conscious and the unconscious. I also call your attention that this is not the only mechanism utilized in the analytic treatment; you are all acquainted with the more powerful mechanism lying in the utilization of the "transference." I shall endeavor in the future to deal with all these relationships which are important for the understanding of the treatment in a "General Method of Psychoanalysis." Nor is it necessary for me to reject your objection that in the present practice of our treatment the proof of the correctness of our assumption becomes obscured. You will not forget that these proofs are to be found elsewhere, and that a therapeutic encroachment cannot be conducted like a theoretical examination.

Allow me now to touch upon some spheres wherein we can learn something new and where we actually discover something new every day. The most prominent of these is the symbolism in the dream and in the unconscious. A theme forcibly contested, as you know! It is no small merit that our colleague, W. Stekel, has earned, when he devoted himself to dream symbolism, unconcerned about the protests raised by all the opponents. Here there is really much to be learned; my "Interpretation of Dreams" written in 1899 received important supplements from the study of symbols.

I should like to tell you something about one of these newly recognized symbols. Sometime ago I learned that a psychologist who is unfamiliar with our work remarked to one of my friends that we are surely overestimating the secret sexual significance of dreams. He stated that his most frequent dream was of climbing a stairway and that there was surely nothing sexual behind this. Our attention having been called to this objection, we directed our investigations to the occurrence of stairways, stairs, and ladders in the dream, and we soon ascertained that stairs (or anything analogous to them) represents a definite symbol of coitus. The basis for this comparison is not difficult to find. Under