objection put in this way is perfectly valid, but we have to add that it is only so when the patient is really conscious of the duties he has to fulfil, not only academically, in their general theoretical outlines but in their most minute details. It is characteristic for neurotic people to be wanting in this knowledge, although, because of their intelligence, they are well aware of the general duties of life, and struggle, perhaps only too hard, to fulfil the prescriptions of current morality. But the much more important duties which he ought to fulfil towards himself are to a great extent unknown to the neurotic; sometimes even they are not known at all. It is not enough, therefore, to follow the patient blindfold on the path of regression, and to push him by an inopportune etiological interest back into his infantile phantasies. I have often heard from patients, with whom the psychoanalytic treatment has come to a standstill: "The doctor believes I must have somewhere some infantile trauma, or an infantile phantasy which I am still repressing." Apart from the cases where this supposition was really true, I have seen cases in which the stoppage was caused by the fact that the libido, hauled up by the analysis, sank back into the depths again for want of employment. This was due to the physician's attention being directed entirely to the infantile phantasies, and his failing therefore to see what duties of the moment the patient had to fulfil. The consequence was that the libido brought forth by analysis always sank back again, as no opportunity for further activity was found.
There are many patients who, on their own account, discover their life-tasks and abandon the production of regressive phantasies pretty soon, because they prefer to live in reality, rather than in their phantasies. It is a pity that this cannot be said of all patients. A good many of them forsake for a long time, or even forever, the fulfilment of their life-tasks, and prefer their idle neurotic dreaming. I must again emphasize that we do not understand by "dreaming" always a conscious phenomenon.
In accordance with these facts and these views, the character of psychoanalysis has changed during the course of time. If the first stage of psychoanalysis was perhaps a kind of surgery, which would remove from the mind of the patient the foreign body, the "blocked" affect, the later form has been a kind of historical method, which tries to investigate carefully the genesis of the
