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(f) Finally, Gentlemen, I must confess that it is hardly fair to take up your attention for so long on the subject of psycho-analytic therapy without telling you in what this treatment consists and on what it is based. Still, as I am forced to be brief, I can only hint at this: This therapy, then, is based on the recognition that unconscious ideas - or better, the unconsciousness of certain mental processes - are the direct cause of the morbid symptoms. We share this opinion with the French school (Janet) who, by the way, owing to excessive schematization, refer the cause of hysterical symptoms to an unconscious idée fixe. Now please do not be afraid that this is going to land us in the depths of philosophical obscurities. Our unconscious is not quite the same thing as that of philosophers and, moreover, the majority of philosophers will hear nothing of ‘unconscious mental processes’. If, however, you will look at the matter from our point of view, you will understand that the transformation of this unconscious material in the mind of the patient into conscious material must have the result of correcting his deviation from normality and of lifting the compulsion to which his mind has been subjected. For conscious will-power governs only conscious mental processes, and every mental compulsion is rooted in the unconscious. Nor need you ever fear that the patient will be harmed by the shock accompanying the introduction of the unconscious into consciousness, for you can convince yourselves theoretically that the somatic and emotional effect of an impulse that has become conscious can never be so powerful as that of an unconscious one. It is only by the application of our highest mental functions, which are bound up with consciousness, that we can control all our impulses.

There is, however, another angle from which you may seek to understand the psycho-analytic method. The uncovering and translating of the unconscious occurs in the face of a continuous resistance on the part of the patient. The process of bringing this unconscious material to light is associated with unpleasure, and because of this the patient rejects it again and again. It is for you then to interpose in this conflict in the patient’s mental life. If you succeed in persuading him to accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now, in consequence of this automatic regulation by unpleasure, he has rejected (repressed), you will have accomplished something towards his education. For it is education even to induce someone who dislikes getting up early to do so all the same. Psycho-analytic treatment may in general be conceived of as such a re-education in overcoming internal resistances. Re-education of this kind is, however, in no respect more necessary to nervous patients than in regard to the mental element in their sexual life. For nowhere else have civilization and education done so much harm as in this field, and this is the point, as experience will show you, at which to look for those aetiologies of the neuroses that are amenable to influence; for the other aetiological factor, the constitutional component, consists of something fixed and unalterable. And from this it follows that one important qualification is required of the physician in this work: not only must his own character be irreproachable - ‘As to morals, that goes without saying’, as the hero of Vischer’s novel Auch Einer was in the habit of declaring - but he must also have overcome in his own mind that mixture of prurience and prudery with which, unfortunately, so many people habitually consider sexual problems.