It is unnecessary to trouble you with instances of this phenomenon. It is an every-day experience that our emotions are never at the level of our reasoning. It is exactly the same with such a patient, only with greater intensity. He may perhaps believe that, save for his neurosis, he is a normal person, and hence adapted to the conditions of life. He does not suspect that he has not relinquished certain childish pretensions, that he still carries with him, in the background, expectations and illusions which he has never rendered conscious to himself. He cultivates all sorts of favorite phantasies, which seldom become conscious, or at any rate, not very often, so that he himself does not know that he has them. They very often exist only as emotional expectations, hopes, prejudices, etc. We call these phantasies, unconscious phantasies. Sometimes they dip into the peripheral consciousness as quite fugitive thoughts, which disappear again a moment later, so that the patient is unable to say whether he had such phantasies or not. It is only during the psychoanalytic treatment that most patients learn to observe and retain these fleeting thoughts. Although most of the phantasies, once at least, have been conscious in the form of fleeting thoughts and only afterwards became unconscious, we have no right to call them on that account “conscious,” as they are practically most of the time unconscious. It is therefore right to designate them “unconscious phantasies.” Of course there are also infantile phantasies, which are perfectly conscious and which can be reproduced at any time. Footnote 7: Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologisch Forschungen, Bd. I. Footnote 8: Am. Jour. Psychol., April, 1910. CHAPTER V The Unconscious The sphere of the unconscious infantile phantasies has become the real object of psychoanalytic investigation. As we have previously pointed out, this domain seems to retain the key to the etiology of neurosis. In contradistinction with the trauma theory, we are forced by the reasons already adduced to seek in the family history for the basis of our present psychoanalytic attitude. Those phantasy-systems which patients exhibit on mere questioning are for the most part composed and elaborated like a novel or a drama. Although they are greatly elaborated, they are relatively of little value for the investigation of the unconscious. Just because they are conscious, they have already deferred over-much to the claims of etiquette and social morality. Hence they have been purged of all personally painful and ugly details, and are presentable to society, revealing very little. The valuable, and much more important phantasies are not conscious in the sense already defined, but are to be discovered through the technique of psychoanalysis.