e and
well-justified expression for an established fact." The physician cannot
but reject with a shrug of his shoulders the assertion that
"consciousness is the indispensable quality of the psychic"; he may
assume, if his respect for the utterings of the philosophers still be
strong enough, that he and they do not treat the same subject and do not
pursue the same science. For a single intelligent observation of the
psychic life of a neurotic, a single analysis of a dream must force upon
him the unalterable conviction that the most complicated and correct
mental operations, to which no one will refuse the name of psychic
occurrences, may take place without exciting the consciousness of the
person. It is true that the physician does not learn of these
unconscious processes until they have exerted such an effect on
consciousness as to admit communication or observation. But this effect
of consciousness may show a psychic character widely differing from the
unconscious process, so that the internal perception cannot possibly
recognize the one as a substitute for the other. The physician must
reserve for himself the right to penetrate, by a process of deduction,
from the effect on consciousness to the unconscious psychic process; he
learns in this way that the effect on consciousness is only a remote
psychic product of the unconscious process and that the latter has not
become conscious as such; that it has been in existence and operative
without betraying itself in any way to consciousness.

A reaction from the over-estimation of the quality of consciousness
becomes the indispensable preliminary condition for any correct insight
into the behavior of the psychic. In the words of Lipps, the unconscious
must be accepted as the general basis of the psychic life. The
unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the
smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its
preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop
with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity.
Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; _its inner
nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world,
and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of
consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our
sensory organs_.

A series of dream problems which have intensely occupied older authors
will be laid aside when the old opposition betwe