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

its hills and pitfalls, demands and considerations. For I know that it is the
same in all sciences, and must be so in their beginnings particularly. I know,
too, that teaching as a rule endeavors to hide these difficulties and these
incompletely developed phases from the student. But that will not do in
psychoanalysis. I have, as a matter of fact, made two assumptions, one
within the other, and he who finds the whole too troublesome and too
uncertain or is accustomed to greater security or more elegant derivations,
need go no further with us. What I mean is, he should leave psychological
problems entirely alone, for it must be apprehended that he will not find the
sure and safe way he is prepared to go, traversable. Then, too, it is
superfluous for a science that has something to offer to plead for auditors and
adherents. Its results must create its atmosphere, and it must then bide its
time until these have attracted attention to themselves.
I would warn those of you, however, who care to continue, that my two
assumptions are not of equal worth. The first, that the dream is a psychic
phenomenon, is the assumption we wish to prove by the results of our work.
The other has already been proved in another field, and I take the liberty only
of transferring it from that field to our problem.
Where, in what field of observation shall we seek the proof that there is in
man a knowledge of which he is not conscious, as we here wish to assume in
the case of the dreamer? That would be a remarkable, a surprising fact, one
which would change our understanding of the psychic life, and which would
have no need to hide itself. To name it would be to destroy it, and yet it
pretends to be something real, a contradiction in terms. Nor does it hide
itself. It is no result of the fact itself that we are ignorant of its existence and
have not troubled sufficiently about it. That is just as little our fault as the fact
that all these psychological problems are condemned by persons who have
kept away from all observations and experiments which are decisive in this
respect.
The proof appeared in the field of hypnotic phenomena. When, in the year
1889, I was a witness to the extraordinarily enlightening demonstrations of
Siebault and Bernheim in Nancy, I witnessed also the following experiment: If
one placed a man in the somnambulistic state, allowed him to have all
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