is unknown, even to the most frank and honest person. Without analysis the physician will inevitably be blindfolded in all those places where he meets his own complexes; this is a situation of dangerous importance in the analysis of transference. Do not forget that the complexes of a neurotic are only the complexes of all human beings, the psychoanalyst included. Through the interference of your own hidden wishes you will do the greatest harm to your patients. The psychoanalyst must never forget that the final aim of psychoanalysis is the personal freedom and moral independence of the patient.
The Analysis of Dreams
Here, as everywhere in analysis, we have to follow the patient along the line of his own impulses, even if the path seems to be a wrong one. Error is just as important a condition of mental progress as truth. In this second step of analysis, with all its hidden precipices and sand-banks, we owe a great deal to dreams. At the beginning of analysis dreams chiefly helped in discovering phantasies; here they guide us, in a most valuable way, to the application of the libido. Freud's work laid the foundation of an immense increase in our knowledge in regard to the interpretation of the dream's content, through its historical material and its tendency to express wishes. He showed us how dreams open the way to the acquisition of unconscious material. In accordance with his genius for the purely historical method, he apprises us chiefly of the analytical relations. Although this method is incontestably of the greatest importance, we ought not to take up this standpoint exclusively, as such an historical conception does not sufficiently take account of the teleological meaning of dreams.
Conscious thinking would be quite insufficiently characterized, if we considered it only from its historical determinants. For its complete valuation, we have unquestionably to consider its teleological or prospective meaning as well. If we pursued the history of the English Parliament back to its first origin, we should certainly arrive at a perfect understanding of its development, and the determination of its present form. But we should know nothing about its prospective function, that is, about the work which it has to accomplish now, and in the future. The same
