Being Entirely Honest With Oneself Is

This remark appears in a letter from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, his closest confidant during the 1890s, collected in The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess (published posthumously in 1950). Freud used these letters as a laboratory for his developing ideas, and his emphasis on self-honesty reflects both his personal method — which included his own self-analysis during 1897–99 — and his clinical conviction that self-deception is the root of neurotic suffering. The injunction anticipates what later psychoanalysts would call the requirement of the analyst's own analysis.