- fluence of the unconscious. We find those effects in the disturbances
of the experiment which I have called the "indicators of the complex." The task which the association-experiment gives to the person experimented upon is so extraordinarily easy and simple that even children can accomplish it without difficulty. It is, therefore, very remarkable that so many disturbances of an intentional action should be noted in this experiment. The only reasons or causes of these disturbances which can usually be shown, are the partly conscious, partly not-conscious constellations, caused by the so-called complexes. In the greater number of these disturbances, we can without difficulty establish the relation to images of emotional complexes. We often need the psychoanalytic method to explain these relations, that is, we have to ask the person experimented upon or the patient, what associations he can give to the disturbed reactions. We thus gain the historical matter which serves as a basis for our judgment. The intelligent objection has already been made that the person experimented upon could say what he liked, in other words, any nonsense. This objection is made, I believe, in the unconscious supposition that the historian who collects the matter for his monograph is an idiot, incapable of distinguishing real parallels from apparent ones and true documents from crude falsifications. The professional man has means at his disposal by which clumsy mistakes can be avoided with certainty, and the slighter ones very probably. The mistrust of our opponents is here really delightful. For anyone who understands psychoanalytic work it is a well-known fact that it is not so very difficult to see where there is coherence, and where there is none. Moreover, in the first place these fraudulent declarations are very significant of the person experimented upon, and secondly, in general rather easily to be recognized as fraudulent.
In association-experiments, we are able to recognize the very intense effects produced by the unconscious in what are called complex-interventions. These mistakes made in the association-experiment are nothing but the prototypes of the mistakes made in everyday life, which are for the greater part to be considered as interventions. Freud brought together such material in his book, "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life."
These include the so-called symptomatic actions, which from
