Note 35 — Chapter V · ORGANIC ANALYSIS OF REPRESSION AND OF THE FACTOR OF RESISTANCE FROM THE INDIVIDUAL VIEWPOINT

A striking instance of psychoanalytic unconsciousness may be seen in the analyst’s quite naïve attitude toward his own unconscious need for such infantile pacifiers as he finds in the obsessive use of tobacco. That such diversions are no more adult than the use of the rubber ring or nipple of his infancy he does not for a moment suspect, the concomitance of such practices with the oral eroticism of his childhood having only a theoretical significance for him. The truth is, the psychoanalyst wants to smoke. Of course, it is not consistent with his teaching and if he is to have his way in the matter some process must be devised that will make it consistent. And so in his authoritarian suzerainty he forthwith decrees that the patient who objects to a smoke-filled room is a prey to unseemly resistances, and that his or her attitude of mind, not the analyst’s, must be promptly looked into with a view to summary treatment.