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VII. ASSESSMENT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

What we have put together in the preceding discussions is probably as much as we can say about the Ucs. so long as we only draw upon our knowledge of dream-life and the transference neuroses. It is certainly not much, and at some points it gives an impression of obscurity and confusion; and above all it offers us no possibility of co-ordinating or subsuming the Ucs. into any context with which we are already familiar. It is only the analysis of one of the affections which we call narcissistic psychoneuroses that promises to furnish us with conceptions through which the enigmatic Ucs. will be brought more within our reach and, as it were, made tangible.

Since the publication of a work by Abraham (1908) - which that conscientious author has attributed to my instigation - we have tried to base our characterization of Kraepelin’s ‘dementia praecox’ (Bleuler’s ‘schizophrenia’) on its position with reference to the antithesis between ego and object. In the transference neuroses (anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis) there was nothing to give special prominence to this antithesis. We knew, indeed, that frustration in regard to the object brings on the outbreak of the neurosis and that the neurosis involves a renunciation of the real object; we knew too that the libido that is withdrawn from the real object reverts first to a phantasied object and then to one that had been repressed (introversion). But in these disorders object-cathexis in general is retained with great energy, and more detailed examination of the process of repression has obliged us to assume that object-cathexis persists in the system Ucs. in spite of - or rather in consequence of - repression. Indeed, the capacity for transference, of which we make use for therapeutic purposes in these affections, presupposes an unimpaired object-cathexis.