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The therapeutic influence of psycho-analysis depends on the replacement of unconscious mental acts by conscious ones and is effective within the limits of that factor. The replacement is effected by overcoming internal resistances in the patient’s mind. The future will probably attribute far greater importance to psycho-analysis as the science of the unconscious than as a therapeutic procedure.

Psycho-analysis, in its character of depth-psychology, considers mental life from three points of view: the dynamic, the economic and the topographical.

From the first of these standpoints, the dynamic one, psycho-analysis derives all mental processes (apart from the reception of external stimuli) from the interplay of forces, which assist or inhibit one another, combine with one another, enter into compromises with one another, etc. All of these forces are originally in the nature of instincts; thus they have an organic origin. They are characterized by possessing an immense (somatic) store of power (‘the compulsion to repeat’); and they are represented mentally as images or ideas with an affective charge. In psycho-analysis, no less than in other sciences, the theory of the instincts is an obscure subject. An empirical analysis leads to the formulation of two groups of instincts: the so-called ‘ego-instincts’, which are directed towards self-preservation, and the ‘object-instincts’, which are concerned with relations to an external object. The social instincts are not regarded as elementary or irreducible. Theoretical speculation leads to the suspicion that there are two fundamental instincts which lie concealed behind the manifest ego-instincts and object-instincts: namely (a) Eros, the instinct which strives for ever closer union, and (b) the instinct of destruction, which leads towards the dissolution of what is living. In psycho-analysis the manifestation of the force of Eros is given the name ‘libido’.