Sigmund Freud skriver til sin venn Wilhelm Fliess om hva han tror er årsaken til skrivesperren han sliter med. Den har satt ham på sporet av drømmens gåter.

Sigmund Freud skriver til sin venn Wilhelm Fliess i Berlin (her gjengitt i engelsk oversettelse -- originalen er på tysk):

"I know that at the moment I am useless as a correspondent, with no right to any claims, but it was not always so and it will not remain so. I still do not know what has been happening to me. Something from the deepest depths of my own neurosis set itself against any advance in the understanding of the neuroses, and you have somehow been involved in it.

For my writing paralysis seems to me designed to inhibit our communication. ... I see that the defense against memories does not prevent their giving rise to higher psychic structures, which persist for a while and then are themselves subjected to defense. This, however, is a most highly specific kindóprecisely as in dreams, which contain in nuce [in a nutshell] the psychology of the neuroses in general.

What we are faced with are falsifications of memory and fantasies -- the latter relating to the past or future. I know roughly the rules in accordance with which these structures are put together and the reasons why they are stronger than genuine memories, and I have thus learned new things about the characteristics of the processes in the Ucs.

Alongside these, perverse impulses arise; and when, as later becomes necessary, these fantasies and impulses are repressed, the higher determinations of the symptoms already following from the memories make their appearance, as well as new motives for adhering to the illness. I am learning to recognize a few typical cases of how these fantasies and impulses are put together and a few typical determinants for the initiation of reression against them.

This knowledge is not yet complete. My technique is beginning to prefer a particular method as being the natural one. The most certain thing seems to me to be explanation of dreams, but it is surrounded by a vast number of obstinate riddles.

The organological side awaits your [solution]: I have made no advances there.

There is an interesting dream of wandering about among atrangers, totally or half undressed and with feelings of shame and anxiety. Oddly enough, it is the rule that people do not notice it -- for which we must thank wish fulfillment. This dream material, which goes back to exhibiting in childhood, had been misunderstood and worked over didactically in a well-known fairy tale. (The king's imaginary clothes -- "Talisman.") The ego habitually misinterprets other dreams in the same way. "