Now let us turn to the second conclusion to be drawn from our analyses; it is one upon which we shall not need to impose any subsequent limitation. With the first patient we have heard of the senseless obsessive act she performed and of the intimate memories she recalled in connection with it; we also considered the relation between the two, and deduced the purpose of the obsessive act from its connection with the memory. But there is one factor which we have entirely neglected, and yet it is one which deserves our fullest attention. As long as the patient continued this performance she did not know that it was in any way connected with the previous experience; the connection between the two things was hidden; she could quite truly answer that she did not know what impulse led her to do it. Then it happened suddenly that, under the influence of the treatment, she found this connection and was able to tell it. But even then she knew nothing of the purpose she had in performing the action, the purpose that was to correct a painful event of the past and to raise the husband she loved in her own estimation. It took a long time and much effort for her to grasp, and admit to me, that such a motive as this alone could have been the driving force behind the obsessive act. The connection with the scene on the morning after the unhappy bridal-night, and the patient’s own tender feeling for her husband, together, make up what we have called the “meaning” of the obsessive act. But both sides of this meaning were hidden from her, she understood neither the _whence_ nor the _whither_ of her act, as long as she carried it on. Mental processes had been at work in her, therefore, of which the obsessive act was the effect; she was aware in a normal manner of their effect; but nothing of the mental antecedents of this effect had come to the knowledge of her consciousness. She was behaving exactly like a subject under hypnotism whom Bernheim had ordered to open an umbrella in the ward five minutes after he awoke, but who had no idea why he was doing it. This is the kind of occurrence we have in mind when we speak of the existence of _unconscious mental processes_; we may challenge anyone in the world to give a more correctly scientific explanation of this matter, and will then gladly withdraw our inference that unconscious mental processes exist. Until they do, however, we will adhere to this inference and, when anyone objects that in a scientific sense the Unconscious has no reality, that it is a mere makeshift, _une façon de parler_, we must resign ourselves with a shrug to rejecting his statement as incomprehensible. Something unreal, which can nevertheless produce something so real and palpable as an obsessive action!