ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic therapy must strive to make the patient conscious of the meaning, for instance, of an obsessive action and therefore of the motives that are impelling him to it. The analyst fulfils a protective function in being present and in providing the framework of the psychoanalytic situation. At the oral level conflicts occur that concern the physical and early psychosomatic existence. Already in 1908 Sigmund Freud pointed to the fact that phantasies correspond to wish-fulfilling dreams, "the secular dreams of humanity", and thus they stem from a primitive activity of the psyche. In contrast to the theoretical concepts of sense, repression, and unconscious conflicts, the phenomenon of resistance, which in Freud's theory corresponds to defence, is accorded undeniable existence. Of decisive significance was Freud's discovery that what could apparently be reached effortlessly through suggestion in hypnosis could only be achieved in the waking state through the overcoming of resistance.
