June(?) 1917

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I would like to add a few words about the unconscious (the It). If I understand the matter correctly, researches in the psychoanalytic field have so far led people to derive from the unconscious important aspects of human life in religion, language, art, technology, daily life, in physiology, and pathology. Yet there is still, at least apparently, a contrast between the unconscious and consciousness, as if there were two forces at work. Even in psychoanalytic circles many phenomena of life are apparently still claimed as pure products of consciousness, as if the unconscious had nothing to do with them. I am of the opinion that consciousness is merely a form of expression used by the It; that everything which happens in human life (animal