In the second patient fundamentally the same thing is found. She has instituted a rule that the bolster must not touch the back of the bedstead, and she had to carry out this rule, but she does not know whence it comes, what it means, or to what it owes its strength. Whether she regards it indifferently, or struggles against it, or rages against it, or determines to overcome it, matters not; it will be followed. It must be followed; in vain she asks herself why. It is undeniable that these symptoms of the obsessional neurosis, these ideas and these impulses which arise no man knows where and which oppose such a powerful resistance against all the influences to which an otherwise normal mental life is susceptible, give the impression, even to the patients themselves, of being all-powerful visitants from another world, immortal beings mingling in the whirlpool of mortal things. In these symptoms lies the clearest indication of a special sphere of mental activity cut off from all the rest. They show the way unmistakably to conviction on the question of the unconscious in the mind; and for that very reason clinical psychiatry, which only recognizes a psychology of consciousness, can do nothing with these symptoms except to stigmatize them as signs of a special kind of degeneration. Naturally, the obsessive ideas and impulses are not themselves unconscious, any more than is the performance of the obsessive acts. They would not have become symptoms if they had not penetrated into consciousness. But the mental antecedents of them disclosed by analysis, the connections into which they fit after interpretation, are unconscious, at least until the time when we make the patient conscious of them by the work of the analysis. Consider now, in addition, that the facts established in these two cases are confirmed in every symptom of every neurotic disease; that always and everywhere the meaning of the symptoms is unknown to the sufferer; that analysis invariably shows that these symptoms are derived from unconscious mental processes which can, however, under various favourable conditions, become conscious. You will then understand that we cannot dispense with the unconscious part of the mind in psycho-analysis, and that we are accustomed to deal with it as with something actual and tangible. Perhaps you will also be able to realize how unfitted all those who only know the Unconscious as a phrase, who have never analysed, never interpreted dreams, or translated neurotic symptoms into their meaning and intention, are to form an opinion on this matter. I will repeat the substance of it again in order to impress it upon you: The fact that it is possible to find meaning in neurotic symptoms by means of analytic interpretation is an irrefutable proof of the existence—or, if you prefer it, of the necessity for assuming the existence—of unconscious mental processes.