20. The World of the Unconscious and the World of Common Sense*

The basic procedure of analysis, due to Freud, is well known. The patient tries to convey his conscious thoughts and feelings to the analyst who, in virtue of his own previous analysis, believes that in many of them he can recognize the influence of other thoughts and feelings which are repressed. When he interprets this connection, the patient may himself recognize it as correct or he may not do so for one of two reasons: either he may understand the interpretation but reject it as untrue, or he may fail to understand it. In both cases, if the analyst still believes his interpretation to have been correct and lucidly expressed, he will attribute the patient's failure to accept it to an affective resistance which he will try to analyse in turn. But there are intermediate cases in which the sense of an interpretation, though verbally understood, will seem too ‘impossible’ to be vividly conceived; and here, at least, a specific intellectual problem may also be involved.

The contrast between two sorts of interpretation, one comparatively superficial and the other deep, may illustrate the kind of problem I have in mind. A woman patient1 begins a session by saying she has just seen an overdressed person in the street, who looked like a prostitute and to whom she has taken an immediate dislike. From such material, if supported by previous evidence of a similar kind, the analyst perhaps infers that, unconsciously, she believes this person to be another, and