forth by analysis always sank back again, as no opportunity for further activity was found. There are many patients who, on their own account, discover their life-tasks and abandon the production of regressive phantasies pretty soon, because they prefer to live in reality, rather than in their phantasies. It is a pity that this cannot be said of all patients. A good many of them forsake for a long time, or even forever, the fulfilment of their life-tasks, and prefer their idle neurotic dreaming. I must again emphasize that we do not understand by “dreaming” always a conscious phenomenon. In accordance with these facts and these views, the character of psychoanalysis has changed during the course of time. If the first stage of psychoanalysis was perhaps a kind of surgery, which would remove from the mind of the patient the foreign body, the “blocked” affect, the later form has been a kind of historical method, which tries to investigate carefully the genesis of the neurosis, down to its smallest details, and to reduce it to its earliest origins. The Conception of Transference This last method has unmistakably been due to strong scientific interest, the traces of which are clearly seen in the delineations of cases so far. Thanks to this, Freud was also able to discover wherein lay the therapeutical effect of psychoanalysis. Whilst formerly this was sought in the discharge of the traumatic affect, it was now seen that the phantasies produced were especially associated with the personality of the physician. Freud calls this process _transference_ (“Uebertragung”), owing to the fact that the images of the parents (“imagines”) are henceforth transferred to the physician, along with the infantile attitude of mind adopted towards the parents. The transference does not arise solely in the intellectual sphere, but the libido bound up with the phantasy is transferred, together with the phantasy itself, to the personality of the physician, so that the physician replaces the parents to a certain extent. All the apparently sexual phantasies which have been connected with the parents are now connected with the physician, and the less this is realized by the patient, the more he will be unconsciously bound to his physician. This recognition is in many ways of prime importance.