...perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.

Psychoanalysis remains influential within psychiatry and across the humanities. His analysis of his own and his patients dreams as wish-fulfilments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the mechanisms of repression as well as for further elaboration of his theory of the unconscious as an agency disruptive of conscious states of mind. Auden wrote in a poem dedicated to him: "to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives".