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Psychoanalysis is not merely a science which represents an essential enrichment of our knowledge of human mental life; rather, it was first elaborated as a practical method of treatment for influencing mental disturbances.
The essence of the therapeutic technique consists in freeing the patient from the obsessional control of certain instinctive impulses, unbearable to his ego, but insufficiently repressed, which develop their preponderating effect from the unconscious, while the unsuitable process of repression automatically proceeding from the pleasure-pain principle is annulled in the analysis and replaced by the conscious control of these impulses, corresponding to the adaptation to reality.
The means of this influencing are, according to the nature of the malady, less of an intellectual than of an affective kind, and are aided by the patient's desire for health, as well as his intellectual interest in the analysis. By the associations of the patient, his dreams, symptomatic acts, mistakes, and other expressions, avenues to his unconscious are created and gradually broadened, during which, the intensity of the original repression meets the physician as resistance against the disclosure of the unconscious. The overcoming of this resistance is the chief task of the treatment. It succeeds only with