ABSTRACT
Hysteria, dreams, jokes, slips, art, case histories: from here on the going gets a bit tougher so it may be helpful to pause and pull together a few statements about the unconscious that have emerged from the material reviewed so far. The unconscious: • is elsewhere, since censorship ensures it never appears directly
but only indirectly, disguised, in traces; • works with meanings, meanings so charged they can make a
perfectly healthy arm seem paralysed; • works with meanings which take specific forms of
representation, different in jokes and dreams, for example; • seeks pleasure, a demand often expressed in fantasy; • is childish; • has no interest in conventional morality or the ethical obligations
of civilisation; • can contradict itself (Little Hans feared horses and felt compelled
to look at them).
