I explained that a big thing like that cannot be forgotten, but pointed out that in a case like that the tendency is to forget little things in connection with the big pain. I told him of a case I had myself known. A lady of my acquaintance lived for a few years in Glasgow; then she moved to Edinburgh, where she lived for almost thirty years. Now she lives in London. When she talks of her old home in Edinburgh she always says: "When we were in Glasgow." Invariably she makes this mistake. The reason is almost certainly this: just before she left Edinburgh she lost the one she loved most in life. She says: "When we were in Glasgow" because the word Edinburgh would at once bring back the painful memories connected with her loved one's death. When I was teaching in Hampstead one of my pupils, a boy of sixteen, came to me one day. "That's all rot, what you say about wanting to forget things," he said. "I went and left my walking-stick in a bus yesterday." "Were you tired of it?" I asked. "Tired of it?" he said indignantly. "Why, it was a beauty, a silver-topped cane, got it from mother on my birthday. That proves your theory is all wrong." "Tell me about yesterday," I said. "Well, I was going to a match at lord's, and it looked rather dull, so mother told me I'd better take a gamp. I said it wasn't going to rain, and took my cane, but I had just got on the top of a bus when down came the rain in bucketfuls and I tell you I was wet to the skin." "So you did mean to leave your cane behind?" I asked, with a smile. "But I tell you I didn't!" "You did, all the same. You kicked yourself because you hadn't taken your mother's advice and brought a gamp. You deliberately left your cane behind you because it had proved useless." I must add that I failed to convince him. Connected with forgetting are what Freud calls symptomatic acts. I leave my stick or gloves behind when I am calling at a house: I conclude that I want to go back there. I go to dinner at the Thomsons', and at their front door I absent-mindedly take out my latch-key. This may mean that I feel at home there; on the other hand, it may mean that I wish I were at home. It is dangerous to dogmatise about the unconscious. I was sitting one night with Wilson, an old college friend of mine. We talked of old times, and I remarked that he had been very lucky in his lodgings during his college course. "Yes," he said, "I was in the same digs all the five years. She was a ripping landlady was Mrs.--Mrs.--Good Lord! I've forgotten her name!" He tried to recall the name, but had to give it up. Two hours later, as he rose to go, he exclaimed: "I remember the name now! Mrs. Watson!" "What are your associations to the name Watson?" I asked. "Associations? What do you mean?" "What's the first thing that comes into your head in connection with the name?" I asked. He made an effort to concentrate his mind, then suddenly he laughed shortly.