Clearly these objections threaten to spoil the success of our work. We must guard against them when we are interpreting our own dreams by resolving firmly not to yield to them, and, in interpreting those of someone else, by laying down the hard and fast rule that he must not withhold any association, even if one of the four objections I have named rises up against it, namely, that it is too unimportant, too absurd, too irrelevant or too unpleasant to speak of. He promises to keep this rule, and we may well feel annoyed when we find how badly he fulfils his promise later on. At first we account for this by imagining that in spite of our authoritative assurance he is not convinced that the process of free association will be justified by its results; and perhaps our next idea will be to win him over first to our theory, by giving him books to read or sending him to lectures so that he may be converted to our views on the subject. But we shall be saved from any such false steps by observing that the same critical objections against certain associations arise even in ourselves, whom we surely cannot suspect of doubt, and can only subsequently, on second thoughts as it were, be overcome. Instead of being annoyed at the dreamer’s disobedience, we can turn this experience to good account as a means of learning something new, something which is the more important the more unprepared we were for it. We realize that the work of dream-interpretation is encountering opposition by a _resistance_ which expresses itself in this very form of critical objections. This resistance is independent of the theoretical conviction of the dreamer. We learn even more than this. Experience shows that a critical objection of this nature is never justified. On the contrary, the associations which people wish to suppress in this way prove _without exception_ to be the most important, to be decisive for the discovery of the unconscious thought. When an association is accompanied by an objection of this sort it positively calls for special notice.