1. You may have received an impression that even with strict adherence to technique our work of dream-interpretation leaves so much room for uncertainty that reliable translation of manifest dreams into their latent dream-thoughts will be thereby frustrated. You will urge first that one never knows whether any particular element in a dream is to be understood literally or symbolically, since things employed as symbols do not thereby cease to be themselves. Where there is no objective evidence to decide the question the interpretation on that particular point will be left to be arbitrarily determined by the interpreter. Further, since in the dream-work opposites coincide, it is in every instance uncertain whether a specific dream-element is to be understood in a positive or a negative sense, as itself or as its opposite—another opportunity for the interpreter to exercise a choice. Thirdly, on account of the frequency with which inversion of every kind is employed in dreams, it is open to him to assume whenever he chooses that such an inversion has taken place. Finally you will point to having heard that one is seldom certain that the interpretation arrived at is the only possible one, and that there is danger of overlooking another perfectly admissible interpretation of the same dream. In these circumstances, you will conclude, the discretion of the interpreter has a latitude that seems incompatible with any objective certainty in the result. Or you may also assume that the fault does not lie in dreams themselves, but that something erroneous in our conceptions and premises produces the unsatisfactory character of our interpretations.