he unconscious, we might be tempted by
these figures, borrowed from the idea of a struggle over a territory, to
assume that an arrangement is really broken up in one psychic locality
and replaced by a new one in the other locality. For these comparisons
we substitute what would seem to correspond better with the real state
of affairs by saying that an energy occupation is displaced to or
withdrawn from a certain arrangement so that the psychic formation falls
under the domination of a system or is withdrawn from the same. Here
again we replace a topical mode of presentation by a dynamic; it is not
the psychic formation that appears to us as the moving factor but the
innervation of the same.

I deem it appropriate and justifiable, however, to apply ourselves still
further to the illustrative conception of the two systems. We shall
avoid any misapplication of this manner of representation if we remember
that presentations, thoughts, and psychic formations should generally
not be localized in the organic elements of the nervous system, but, so
to speak, between them, where resistances and paths form the correlate
corresponding to them. Everything that can become an object of our
internal perception is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced
by the passage of the rays of light. But we are justified in assuming
the existence of the systems, which have nothing psychic in themselves
and which never become accessible to our psychic perception,
corresponding to the lenses of the telescope which design the image. If
we continue this comparison, we may say that the censor between two
systems corresponds to the refraction of rays during their passage into
a new medium.

Thus far we have made psychology on our own responsibility; it is now
time to examine the theoretical opinions governing present-day
psychology and to test their relation to our theories. The question of
the unconscious, in psychology is, according to the authoritative words
of Lipps, less a psychological question than the question of psychology.
As long as psychology settled this question with the verbal explanation
that the "psychic" is the "conscious" and that "unconscious psychic
occurrences" are an obvious contradiction, a psychological estimate of
the observations gained by the physician from abnormal mental states was
precluded. The physician and the philosopher agree only when both
acknowledge that unconscious psychic processes are "the appropriat