... dreams evanescence the way in which on awakening our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting itall these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory.

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream No does not seem to exist. In particular it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts.

Accordingly identification or the formation of composite figures serves different purposes first to represent a feature both persons have in common secondly to represent a displaced common feature but thirdly to find expression for a common feature that is merely wished for. Since wishing it to be the case that two people have something in common is often the same as exchanging them this relation too is expressed in the dream by identification. In the dream of Irmas injection I wish to exchange this patient for another that is I wish that the other were my patient as Irma is the dream takes account of the wish in showing me a figure who is called Irma but who is examined in a posture in which I have only had occasion to see the other.

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream No does not seem to exist. In particular it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts.

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.