It is perfectly true that psychoanalysis, like other psycho-therapeutic methods, employs the instrument of suggestion (or transference). But the difference is this: that in analysis it is not allowed to play the decisive part in determining the therapeutic results. It is used instead to induce the patient to perform a piece of mental work—the overcoming of his transference-resistances—which involves a permanent alteration in his mental economy. The transference is made conscious to the patient by the analyst, and it is resolved by convincing him that in his transference-attitude he is _re-experiencing_ emotional relations which had their origin in his earliest object-relationships during the repressed period of his childhood. In this way the transference is changed from the strongest weapon of the resistance into the best instrument of the analytic treatment. Nevertheless, its handling remains the most difficult as well as the most important part of the technique of analysis. With the help of the method of free association and of the closely related art of interpretation, psychoanalysis succeeded in achieving something which appeared to be of no practical importance but which, in fact, necessarily led to a fresh attitude and a fresh scale of values in scientific thought. It became possible to prove that dreams have a meaning and to discover it. In classical antiquity great importance was attached to dreams as foretelling the future; but modern science would have nothing to do with them, it handed them over to superstition, declaring them to be purely “somatic” processes—a kind of spasm occurring in a mind that is otherwise asleep. It seemed quite inconceivable that anyone who had done serious scientific work could make his appearance as an “interpreter of dreams.” But by disregarding the excommunication pronounced upon dreams, by treating them as unexplained neurotic symptoms, as delusional or obsessional ideas, by neglecting their apparent content and by making their separate component images into subjects for free association, a different conclusion was reached. The numerous associations produced by the dreamer led to the discovery of a mental structure which could no longer be described as absurd or confused, which was on an equality with any other product of the mind, and of which the _manifest_ dream was no more than a distorted, abbreviated and misunderstood translation and usually a translation into visual images. These _latent dream-thoughts_ contained the meaning of the dream, while its manifest content was simply a make-believe, a façade, which could serve as a starting-point for the associations but not for the interpretation.