In association-experiments, we are able to recognize the very intense effects produced by the unconscious in what are called complex-interventions. These mistakes made in the association-experiment are nothing but the prototypes of the mistakes made in everyday life, which are for the greater part to be considered as interventions. Freud brought together such material in his book, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.” These include the so-called symptomatic actions, which from another point of view might equally as well be called “symbolic actions,” and the real failures to carry out actions, such as forgetting, slips of the tongue, etc. All these phenomena are the effect of unconscious constellations and therefore so many entrance-gates into the domain of the unconscious. When such errors are cumulative, they are designated as neurosis, which, from this aspect, looks like a defective action and therefore the effect of unconscious constellations or complex-interventions. The association-experiment is thus not directly a means to unlock the unconscious, but rather a technique for obtaining a good selection of defective reactions, which can then be used by psychoanalysis. At least, this is its most reliable form of application at the present time. I may, however, mention that it is possible that it may furnish other especially valuable facts which would grant us some direct glimpses, but I do not consider this problem sufficiently ripe to speak about. Investigations in this direction are going on. I hope that, through my explanation of our method, you may have gained somewhat more confidence in its scientific character, so that you will be by this time more inclined to agree that the phantasies which have been hitherto discovered by means of psychoanalytic work are not merely arbitrary suppositions and illusions of psychoanalysts. Perhaps you are even inclined to listen patiently to what those products of unconscious phantasies can tell us. Footnote 9: Jahrbuch für psychopath. u. psychoanalyt. Forschungen, Bd. II, p. 465. CHAPTER VII The Content of the Unconscious