So now I have to lay before you the psycho-analytic theory of neurotic manifestations. For this purpose it will be simplest, on account of both the analogy and the contrast, to take an example which links up with the phenomena we have already considered. I will take a ‘symptomatic act’ which I see many people commit in my own consulting-room. The analyst has little to offer to the people who come to a physician’s consulting-room for half-an-hour to recount the lifelong misery of their fate. His deeper comprehension makes it difficult for him to give, as another might, the opinion that there is nothing wrong with them and that they had better take a light course of hydrotherapy. One of our colleagues once replied, with a shrug, when asked how he dealt with consultation patients, that he “fined them so many crowns for ‘wasting the time of the court.’” You will therefore not be surprised to hear that even the busiest psycho-analysts are not much sought after for consultations. I have had the ordinary door between the waiting-room and my consulting-room supplemented by another door and covered with felt. The reason for this is obvious. Now it constantly happens when I admit people from the waiting-room that they omit to close these doors, leaving even both doors open behind them. When I see this happen, I at once, with some stiffness, request him or her to go back and make good the omission, no matter how fine a gentleman he may be nor how many hours she had spent on her toilet. My action gives the impression of being uncalled-for and pedantic; occasionally too I have found myself in the wrong, when the person turned out to be one of those who cannot themselves grasp a door-handle and are glad when those with them avoid it. But in the majority of cases I was right, for anyone who behaves in this way and leaves the door of a physician’s consulting-room open into the waiting-room belongs to the rabble and deserves to be received with coldness. Now don’t allow yourselves to be biassed before you have heard the rest. This omission on the part of a patient occurs only when he has been waiting alone in the outer room and thus leaves an empty room behind him, never when others, strangers to him, have also been waiting there. In the latter case he knows very well that it is to his own interest not to be overheard while he talks to the physician and he never neglects to close both doors carefully.