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Although psychoanalysis underwent certain modifications in the lifetime of its founder, there are well-founded basic principles that were laid down at its inception, and from these principles Freud never deviated. Freud recognized that for a variety of reasons a patient may experience an intense conflict (2). The tension or displeasure at this moment may be so overwhelming that the patient eliminates the experience from the context of his memory.
The memory in fact shows a gap—or a patently wrong substitute—for this point or period of time; this seems to protect the patient from re-experiencing the traumatic conflict. Yet the organism from then on, or soon afterwards, shows serious signs of malfunctioning. Malfunctioning becomes evident through symptoms. These symptoms can be dissolved when the individual can be made to remember what really happened and how he felt when it happened.
However, the uncovering of these hidden thoughts was no easy task. Freud first sought to reach the unconscious through hypnosis and later through the method of free association, dreams, slips of the tongue and the total behavior of the patient.
Freud recognized (2) that the unconscious conflict tends to be repeated in the phenomena of transference. He realized that buried loves and hates of the past could be studied in their current manifestation toward the physician. Attitudes of the past are carried over to present-day reality as though to ignore time, place and person. What could not be remembered could become accessible in the transference which seemed to preserve the traits of the distant past. Although the patient may not remember what has been forgotten and repressed, he expresses it in action. He reproduces it, not in his memory but rather in his behavior (2); he repeats it without of course knowing that he is repeating it.
Under certain conditions (3), for example, inadequate gratifications, the libido finds its way back into regression; infantile images are reanimated and are acted