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In his paper, “The Unconscious,” in 1915, Freud wrote “It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs. of one human being can react on that of another, without passing through the Cs. This deserves closer investigation” (p. 194).
Freud's observation was probably influenced by his experience as a hypnotist. Freud was impressed that suggestions can affect hypnotic subjects. The hypnotist can evoke memories, unavailable in the subject's waking state, and he can suggest behavior to be performed by the subject after the trance is lifted. In the posthypnotic state, what was recalled under hypnosis disappears, as does awareness of the hypnotic suggestions. Responses to the hypnotic suggestions appear, and the waking persons invent explanations to account for their post-hypnotic actions.
Similar phenomena occur in daily life. Humorists Elaine May and Mike Nichols depicted guilt-inducing parents who consciously had only affectionate desires, but whose covert messages influenced their children, themselves consciously oblivious to the hidden messages transmitted by the parents' behavior. The guilt-inducing mother who needs no-one to change the light bulb because, she says, she is glad to sit in the dark, is, by now, an obvious example of the power of covert intentions.
Recent psychoanalytic developments, as in the contributions of Kris (1956), Hartmann (1964), Stein (1981), Brenner (1982), and McDevitt (1985), to give only a few examples, have emphasized that unconscious fantasies are expressed covertly in character traits, in interests