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One of the qualities for which Freud is most admired is his devotion to truth. No matter how disturbing his discoveries were to himself and to others, he adhered to them unflinchingly. It is therefore not surprising that truth itself, in a sense, became the curative implement for mental illness. Freud's discovery of repression, the methods the ego uses in order to repress, and the unconscious wherein the repressed material lies, are a description of the ways in which man deludes himself.
Every patient who comes to us tells us, in one way or another, what price he is paying for his repression. The very fact that he has sought us out, testifies to his feeling of helplessness. He experiences himself as controlled by forces he cannot master. The result is a feeling of weakness. This in turn causes anxiety; repressed material is experienced as a dangerous enemy.
As treatment proceeds and the patient improves, we make an interesting discovery. The increased feeling of well-being comes not so much from an ability to control outside or inside forces, but rather from the emotional recognition of the reality of the existence of these forces. For example, the male homosexual is constantly in terror of discovering that he is, in fact, a male. When the truth has at last been emotionally accepted he is no longer pursued by his terror. He experiences himself as master of the situation and to that extent can be at peace. He has no more power to change the biological fact of his sex than he had previously. But since he is no longer “possessed” by his illusion of femaleness, he experiences himself, to that degree, as being free and strong.