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 CHAPTER VI

After this digression we will return to the question of the unconscious phantasies which occupied us before. As we have seen, nobody can dispute their existence, just as nobody can assert their existence and their qualities forthwith. The question, however, is just this: Can effects be observed in the consciousness of unconscious origin, which can be described in conscious symbolic signs or expressions? Can there be found, in the conscious, effects which correspond with this expectation? The psychoanalytic school believes it has discovered such effects. Let me mention at once the principal phenomenon, the dream. Of this it may be said that it appears in the conscionsness as a complex factor unconsciously constructed out of its elements. The origin of the images in certain reminiscences of the earlier or of the later past can be proved through the associations belonging to the single images of the dream. We ask: "Where did you see this?" or "Where did you hear that?" And through the usual way of association come the reminiscences that certain parts of the dream have been consciously experienced, some the day before, some on former occasions. So far there will be general agreement, for these things are well known. In so far, the dream represents in general an incomprehensible composition of certain elements not at first conscious, which are only recognized later on by their associations. It is not that all parts of the dream are recognizable, whence its conscious character could be deduced; on the contrary, they are often, and indeed mostly, unrecognizable at first. Only subsequently does it occur to us that we have experienced in consciousness this or that part of the dream. From this standpoint alone, we might regard the dream as an effect of unconscious origin.

The technique for the exploration of the unconscious origin is the one I mentioned before, used before Freud by every scientific