active in dream-formation, and that in their essentials they reveal the closest analogy with the processes observed in the formation of hysterical symptoms. Now the dream is not a pathological phenomenon; it does not presuppose any disturbance of our psychic equilibrium; and it does not leave behind it any weakening of our efficiency or capacities. The objection that no conclusions can be drawn about the dreams of healthy persons from my own dreams and from those of my neurotic patients may be rejected without comment. If, then, from the nature of the given phenomena we infer the nature of their motive forces, we find that the psychic mechanism utilized by the neuroses is not newly-created by a morbid disturbance that lays hold of the psychic life, but lies in readiness in the normal structure of our psychic apparatus. The two psychic systems, the frontier-censorship between them, the inhibition and overlaying of the one activity by the other, the relations of both to consciousness- or whatever may take place of these concepts on a juster interpretation of the actual relations- all these belong to the normal structure of our psychic instrument, and the dream shows us one of the paths which lead to a knowledge of this structure. If we wish to be content with a minimum of perfectly assured additions to our knowledge, we shall say that the dream affords proof that the suppressed material continues to exist even in the normal person and remains capable of psychic activity. Dreams are one of the manifestations of this suppressed material; theoretically, this is true in all cases; and in tangible experience, it has been found true in at least a great number of cases, which happen to display most plainly the more striking features of the dream-life. The suppressed psychic material, which in the waking state has been prevented from expression and cut off from internal perception by the mutual neutralization of contradictory attitudes, finds ways and means, under the sway of compromise-formations, of obtruding itself on consciousness during the night.

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. *(2)

At any rate, the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life.

* Here, as elsewhere, there are gaps in the treatment of the subject, which I have deliberately left, because to fill them up would, on the one hand, require excessive labour, and, on the other hand, I should have to depend on material which is foreign to the dream. Thus, for example, I have avoided stating whether I give the word suppressed a different meaning from that of the word repressed. No doubt, however, it will have become clear that the latter emphasizes more than the former the relation to the unconscious. I have not gone into the problem, which obviously arises, of why the dream-thoughts undergo distortion by the censorship even when they abandon the progressive path to consciousness, and choose the path of regression. And so with other similar omissions. I have, above all, sought to give some idea of the problems to which the further dissection of the dream- work leads, and to indicate the other themes with which these are connected. It was, however, not always easy to decide just where the pursuit should be discontinued. That I have not treated exhaustively the part which the psycho-sexual life plays in the dream, and have avoided the interpretation of dreams of an obviously sexual content, is due to a special reason- which may not perhaps be that which the reader would expect. It is absolutely alien to my views and my neuropathological doctrines to regard the sexual life as a pudendum with which neither the physician nor the scientific investigator should concern himself. To me, the moral indignation which prompted the translator of Artemidorus of Daldis to keep from the reader's knowledge the chapter on sexual dreams contained in the Symbolism of Dreams is merely ludicrous. For my own part, what decided my procedure was solely the knowledge that in the explanation of sexual dreams I should be bound to get deeply involved in the still unexplained problems of perversion and bisexuality; it was for this reason that I reserved this material for treatment elsewhere.

*(2) If I cannot influence the gods, I will stir up Acheron.

By the analysis of dreams we obtain some insight into the composition of this most marvellous and most mysterious of instruments; it is true that this only takes us a little way, but it gives us a start which enables us, setting out from the angle of other (properly pathological) formations, to penetrate further in our disjoining of the instrument. For disease- at all events that which is rightly called functional- does not necessarily