we dare cite a pertinent quotation from Lipps’s treatise on Komik und Humor, an analysis which throws light on other problems besides the comic and humor. He says: “In the end individual psychological problems always lead us fairly deeply into psychology, so that fundamentally no psychological problem may be considered by itself” (p. 71). The terms “psychic energy,” “discharge,” and the treatment of psychic energy as a quantity have become habitual modes of thinking since I began to explain to myself the fact of psychopathology philosophically. Being of the same opinion as Lipps I have essayed to represent in my Interpretation of Dreams the unconscious psychic processes as real entities, and I have not represented the conscious contents as the “real psychic activity.”[1] Only when I speak about the “investing energy (Besetzung) of
- ↑ Cf. The Interpretation of Dreams, Chap. VII, also On the Psychic Force, etc., in the above cited book of Lipps (p. 123), where he says: “This is the general principle: The dominant factors of the psychic life are not represented by the contents of consciousness but by those psychic processes which are unconscious. The task of psychology, provided it does not limit itself to a mere description of the content of consciousness, must also consist of revealing the nature of these unconscious processes from the nature of the contents of consciousness and its temporal relationship. Psychology must itself be a theory of these processes. But such a psychology will soon find that there exist quite a number of characteristics of these processes which are unrepresented in the corresponding contents of consciousness.
