It is remarkable how little respect you have, in your hearts, for a mental fact! Imagine that someone had undertaken a chemical analysis of a certain substance and had ascertained that one ingredient of it is of a certain weight, so and so many milligrams. From this weight, thus arrived at, certain conclusions may be drawn. Do you think now it would ever occur to a chemist to discredit these conclusions on the ground that the isolated substance might as well have had some other weight? Everyone recognizes the fact that it actually had this weight and no other, and builds further conclusions confidently on that fact. But when it is a question of a mental fact, that it _was_ such an idea and no other that occurred to the person when questioned, you will not accept that as valid, but say that something else might as well have occurred to him! The truth is that you have an illusion of a psychic freedom within you which you do not want to give up. I regret to say that on this point I find myself in sharpest opposition to your views. Now you will break off here only to take up your resistance at another point. You will continue: “We understand that it lies in the peculiar technique of psycho-analysis to bring the person analysed to give the solution of its problems. Let us take another example, that in which the after-dinner speaker calls upon the company to _hiccough_ to the health of their guest. The interfering tendency is, you say, in this case to ridicule; this it is which opposes the intention to do honour. But this is a mere interpretation on your part, based on observations made independently of the slip. If in this case you were to question the perpetrator of the slip he would not confirm your view that he intended an insult; on the contrary, he would vehemently deny it. Why do you not abandon your undemonstrable interpretation in the face of this flat denial?”