I’m reading the essay "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman" from Sexuality and the Psychology of Love by Sigmund Freud. It’s about a young woman who was referred to Freud by her parents: she was tormenting them by her obsessive love for an older bohemian woman. ("This lady was nothing but a cocotte," writes Freud.) The father denounced his daughter, who attempted to kill herself: "The girl rushed off and flung herself over a wall down the side of a cutting on to a railway line." (The whacked-out translation is by Barbara Low and R. Gabler.) During the course of the woman’s treatment, Freud makes a disturbing discovery: the unconscious can lie!
At a certain period, not long after the treatment had begun, the girl brought a series of dreams which, distorted as is customary and couched in the usual dream-language, could nevertheless be easily translated with certainty. Their content, when interpreted, was, however, remarkable. They anticipated the cure of the inversion through the treatment, expressed her joy over the prospects of life then opened before her, confessed her longing for a man’s love and for children, and so might have been welcomed as a gratifying preparation for the desired change…. Warned through some slight impression or other, I told her one day but I did not believe these dreams, that I regarded them as false or hypocritical, and that she intended to deceive me just as she had habitually deceived her father. I was right; after this exposition this kind of dream ceased.
("The inversion" is Freud’s pseudo-scientific term for being gay.) You might think that Sigmund is suggesting that the woman is lying. No, the unconscious is lying. He goes on:
I can imagine that to point out the existence of lying dreams of this kind, destined to please the analyst, will arouse in some readers who call themselves analysts a real storm of helpless indignation. "What!" they will exclaim, "so the unconscious, the real center of our mental life, the part of us that is so much nearer the divine than our poor consciousness, so that too can lie!"
Here, Freud slips and reveals the immense sacred power he invests in the Unconscious.