There are always things that don't hang together. This is an obvious fact, if we do not begin with the idea that inspires all classical, academic psychology, which is that human beings are, as they say, adapted beings, because they are living, and therefore it must all hang together. You are not a psychoanalyst if you accept this. To be a psychoanalyst is simply to open your eyes to the evident fact that nothing malfunctions more than human reality. If you believe that you have a welladapted, reasonable ego, which knows its way around, how to recognize what is to be done and not to be done, and how to take reality into account, then there is nothing left to do but send you packing. Psychoanalysis, and this it shares with common experience, shows you that nothing is more stupid than human destiny, that is, that one is always being fooled. Even when one does do something successfully, it is precisely not what one wanted to do. There is nothing more disappointed than a gentleman who is supposed to have attained the pinnacle of his wishes. One only need speak with him for three minutes, frankly, as perhaps only the artifice of the psychoanalytic couch permits, to know that in the end all that stuff is just the sort of thing he could not care less about and, furthermore, that he is particularly troubled by all sons of things. Analysis is about becoming aware of this and taking it into account.
It is not by accident, because it couldn't be otherwise, that by a bizarre stroke of luck we go through life without meeting anyone but the unhappy. One says to oneself that there must be happy people somewhere. Well then! unless you get that out of your head, you have understood nothing about psychoanalysis. That is what I call taking things seriously. When I told you things had to be taken seriously, it was so that you would take precisely this point seriously, that you never take anything seriously.