Besides, we are still not nearly far enough advanced to allow ourselves to be outraged at the result of our work of interpretation. I think we still do not understand it properly; but first of all it is incumbent upon us to secure it against certain possible attacks. It is not at all difficult to detect weak points in it. Our interpretations were based on hypotheses which we adopted earlier: that there really is some meaning in dreams; that the idea of mental processes being unconscious for a time, which was first arrived at through hypnotic sleep, may be applied also to normal sleep; and that all associations are subject to determination. Now if, reasoning from these hypotheses, we had obtained plausible results in our dream-interpretation we should have been justified in concluding that these hypotheses were correct. But what if these discoveries are of the kind I have described? In that case, surely it seems natural to say: “These results are impossible, absurd, at the very least highly improbable, so there must have been something wrong about the hypotheses. Either the dream is after all not a mental phenomenon, or there is nothing which is unconscious in our normal condition, or there is a flaw somewhere in our technique. Is it not simpler and more satisfactory to assume this than to accept all the abominable conclusions which we profess to have deduced from our hypotheses?” Both! it is both simpler and more satisfactory, but not on that account necessarily more correct. Let us give ourselves time: the matter is not yet ripe for judgement. First of all, we can make the case against our interpretations even stronger. The fact that our results are so unpleasant and repellent would not perhaps weigh so very heavily with us; a stronger argument is the emphatic and well-grounded repudiation by dreamers of the wish-tendencies which we try to foist upon them after interpretating their dreams. “What?” says one, “You want to prove to me from my dream that I grudge the money I have spent on my sister’s dowry and my brother’s education? But it is out of the question; I spend my whole time working for my brothers and sisters and my only interest in life is to do my duty by them, as, being the eldest, I promised our dead mother I would.” Or a woman says: “I am supposed to wish that my husband were dead? Really that is outrageous nonsense! Not only is our married life very happy, though perhaps you won’t believe that, but if he died I should lose everything I possess in the world.” Or someone else will reply: “Do you mean to suggest that I entertain sexual desires towards my sister? The thing is ludicrous; she is nothing to me; we get on badly with one another, and for years I have not exchanged a word with her.” We still might not be much impressed if these dreamers neither admitted nor denied the tendencies attributed to them; we might say that these are just the things of which they are quite unconscious. But when they