At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.
In following the analysis of the dream we have made some progress toward an understanding of the composition of this most marvellous and most mysterious of instruments; to be sure, we have not gone very far, but enough of a beginning has been made to allow us to advance from other so-called pathological formations further into the analysis of the unconscious. Disease—at least that which is justly termed functional—is not due to the destruction of this apparatus, and the establishment of new splittings in its interior; it is rather to be explained dynamically through the strengthening and weakening of the components in the play of forces by which so many activities are concealed during the normal function. We have been able to show in another place how the composition of the apparatus from the two systems permits a subtilisation even of the normal activity which would be impossible for a single system.[1]
(f) The Unconscious and Consciousness—Reality.
On closer inspection we find that it is not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the apparatus but of two kinds of processes or modes of emotional discharge, the assumption of which was explained in the psychological discussions of the previous chapter. This can make no difference for us, for we must always be ready to drop our auxiliary ideas whenever we deem ourselves in position to replace them by something else approaching more closely to the unknown reality. Let us now try to correct some views which might be erroneously formed as long as we regarded the two systems in the crudest and most obvious sense as two localities within the psychic apparatus, views which have left their traces in
- ↑ The dream is not the only phenomenon tending to base psychopathology on psychology. In a short series of unfinished articles ("Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie", entitled Über den psychischen Mechanismus der Vergeslichkeit, 1898, and Über Deckerinnerungen, 1899) I attempt to interpret a number of psychic manifestations from everyday life in support of the same conception. These and other articles on "Forgetting," "Lapse of Speech," &c., have since been published collectively under the title of Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1904 and 1907, of which an English translation will shortly appear.
