CONCEPTIONS AND MISCONCEPTIONS 223 



tion anew on the reminiscences occurring at the point of 

 interruption, it is usual that he will be brought to reveal 

 some incident or trend of marked significance in his affec- 

 tive life. In other words, one comes in such intervals on 

 psychic material which has been submitted to the process 

 of repression and which, with its clusters of associations, 

 constitutes a deterring "complex" in the patient's psychic 

 life. 



In fairness it must be said that the psychoanalytic 

 method of procedure is far simpler to set down in writing 

 than to carry out in actual practice. From the very nature 

 of the neurosis, with its repression or rendering uncon- 

 scious of the most vital trends in the psychic life of the 

 individual, there are, of course, enormous habitual resist- 

 ances to be overcome. To lead the patient to break 

 through this habitual reserve is a task requiring the utmost 

 expenditure of time, patience and ingenuity on the part of 

 the physician, so that not infrequently hours are consumed 

 in arriving at the determination of an objective statement 

 which it would require but a few minutes to set down in 

 writing. 



Of course the central interest in dream analysis lies in 

 Freud's dynamic theory of dreams. Freud teaches that 

 the basic factor in every dream is an unconscious wish 

 fulfilment: that whatever the manifest content may be, 

 however foreign apparently to the idea of a coveted pur- 

 pose, every dream will, on adequate analysis, reveal the 

 presence of a repressed wish. How totally dissimilar in 

 their content are the repressed wishes of the unconscious 

 from what we commonly accept as the interests of our 

 conative life, how utterly abhorrent to our ethical sensi- 

 bilities such latent "wishes" invariably are, what, in short, 

 is the real nature of an unconscious wish, in the sense of 

 Freud, may be gathered only from a thorough study of 

 Freud's dynamic psychology of the unconscious as con- 

 tained in his major work "Die Traumdeutung." 5 It is 



5 Freud: Die Traumdeutung, Vienna, Deuticke, 1910, transla- 

 tion of A. A. Brill. 



