presuppose the destruction of this apparatus, or the establishment of new cleavages in its interior: it can be explained dynamically by the strengthening and weakening of the components of the play of forces, so many of the activities of which are covered up in normal functioning. It might be shown elsewhere how the fact that the apparatus is a combination of two instances also permits of a refinement of its normal functioning which would have been impossible to a single system. *
* The dream is not the only phenomenon that permits us to base our psycho-pathology on psychology. In a short unfinished series of articles in the Monatsschrift fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie ("uber den psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit," 1898, and "uber Deckerinnerungen," 1899) I attempted to interpret a number of psychic manifestations from everyday life in support of the same conception. (These and other articles on "Forgetting," "Lapses of Speech," etc., have now been published in the Psycho- pathology of Everyday Life.)
F. The Unconscious and Consciousness. Reality.
If we look more closely, we may observe that the psychological considerations examined in the foregoing chapter require us to assume, not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the psychic apparatus, but two kinds of processes or courses taken by excitation. But this does not disturb us; for we must always be ready to drop our auxiliary ideas, when we think we are in a position to replace them by something which comes closer to the unknown reality. Let us now try to correct certain views which may have taken a misconceived form as long as we regarded the two systems, in the crudest and most obvious sense, as two localities within the psychic apparatus- views which have left a precipitate in the terms repression and penetration. Thus, when we say that an unconscious thought strives for translation into the preconscious in order subsequently to penetrate through to consciousness, we do not mean that a second idea has to be formed, in a new locality, like a paraphrase, as it were, whilst the original persists by its side; and similarly, when we speak of penetration into consciousness, we wish carefully to detach from this notion any idea of a change of locality. When we say that a preconscious idea is repressed and subsequently absorbed by the unconscious, we might be tempted by these images, borrowed from the idea of a struggle for a particular territory, to assume that an arrangement is really broken up in the one psychic locality and replaced by a new one in the other locality. For these comparisons we will substitute a description which would seem to correspond more closely to the real state of affairs; we will say that an energic cathexis is shifted to or withdrawn from a certain arrangement, so that the psychic formation falls under the domination of a given instance or is withdrawn from it. Here again we replace a topographical mode of representation by a dynamic one; it is not the psychic formation that appears to us as the mobile element, but its innervation. ** This conception underwent elaboration and modification when it was recognized that the essential character of a preconscious idea was its connection with the residues of verbal ideas. See The Unconscious, p. 428 below.
Nevertheless, I think it expedient and justifiable to continue to use the illustrative idea of the two systems. We shall avoid any abuse of this mode of representation if we remember that ideas, thoughts, and psychic formations in general must not in any case be localized in organic elements of the nervous system but, so to speak, between them, where resistances and association-tracks form the correlate corresponding to them. Everything that can become an object of internal perception is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced by the crossing of light-rays. But we are justified in thinking of the systems- which have nothing psychic in themselves, and which never become accessible to our psychic perception- as something similar to the lenses of the telescope, which project the image. If we continue this comparison, we might say that the censorship between the two systems corresponds to the refraction of rays on passing into a new medium.
Thus far, we have developed our psychology on our own responsibility; it is now time to turn and look at the doctrines prevailing in modern psychology, and to examine the relation of these to our theories. The problem of the unconscious in psychology is, according to the forcible statement of Lipps, * less a
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