I certainly have not uncovered the illustrious origins of this vicious idea because I would like to shove the responsibility for it on others. I know well that it is one thing to express an idea once or several times in the form of a rapid _aperçu_, and quite another to take it seriously and literally to lead it through all opposing details and conquer for it a place among accepted truths. It is the difference between a light flirtation and a righteous marriage with all its duties and difficulties. Epouser les idées de—(to marry so and so’s ideas,) is, at least in French, a quite usual form of speech. Other doctrines which were contributed to the cathartic method through my efforts thus transforming it into psychoanalysis, are the following: The theories of repression and resistance, the addition of the infantile sexuality, and the usage and interpretation of dreams for the understanding of the unconscious. Concerning the theory of repression, I was certain that I worked independently. I knew of no influence that directed me in any way to it, and I long considered this idea to be original, till O. Rank showed us the place in Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea,” where the philosopher is struggling for an explanation for insanity.[3] What is there said concerning the striving against the acceptance of a painful piece of reality agrees so completely with the content of my theory of repression that, once again, I must be indebted to my not being well-read for the possibility of making a discovery. To be sure, others have read this passage and overlooked it, without making this discovery and perhaps the same would have happened to me, if, in former years, I had taken more pleasure in reading philosophical authors. In later years I denied myself the great pleasure of Nietzsche’s works, with the conscious motive of not wishing to be hindered in the working out of my psychoanalytic impressions by any preconceived ideas. Therefore, I had to be prepared—and am so gladly—to renounce all claim to priority in those many cases in which the laborious psychoanalytic investigation can only confirm the insights intuitively won by the philosophers.