a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

a definite end. We have here been confronted by problems which will soon
lead us to the elaboration of a dynamics of symptom formation.
I must stop to ask you whether this is not all too vague and too complicated?
Do I not confuse you by so often retracting my words and restricting them,
spinning out trains of thought and then rejecting them? I should be sorry if
this were the case. However, I strongly dislike simplification at the expense of
truth, and am not averse to having you receive the full impression of how
many-sided and complicated the subject is. I also think that there is no harm
done if I say more on every point than you can at the moment make use of. I
know that every hearer and reader arranges what is offered him in his own
thoughts, shortens it, simplifies it and extracts what he wishes to retain.
Within a given measure it is true that the more we begin with the more we
have left. Let me hope that, despite all the by-play, you have clearly grasped
the essential parts of my remarks, those about the meaning of symptoms,
about the unconscious, and the relation between the two. You probably have
also understood that our further efforts are to take two directions: first, the
clinical problem—to discover how persons become sick, how they later on
accomplish a neurotic adaptation toward life; secondly, a problem of psychic
dynamics, the evolution of the neurotic symptoms themselves from the
prerequisites of the neuroses. We will undoubtedly somewhere come on a
point of contact for these two problems.
I do not wish to go any further to-day, but since our time is not yet up I
intend to call your attention to another characteristic of our two analyses,
namely, the memory gaps or amnesias, whose full appreciation will be
possible later. You have heard that it is possible to express the object of
psychoanalytic treatment in a formula: all pathogenic unconscious experience
must be transposed into consciousness. You will perhaps be surprised to learn
that this formula can be replaced by another: all the memory gaps of the
patient must be filled out, his amnesias must be abolished. Practically this
amounts to the same thing. Therefore an important role in the development
of his symptoms must be accredited to the amnesias of the neurotic. The
analysis of our first case, however, will hardly justify this valuation of the
amnesia. The patient has not forgotten the scene from which the compulsion
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