You are right, but you are overlooking an important point, the very thing which deterred me from choosing the association-experiment as a starting-point for this discussion. In this experiment the stimulus-word, the single thing which determines the reaction, is chosen by us at will, and the reaction stands as intermediary between this stimulus-word and the complex aroused in the person experimented upon. In the dream, the stimulus-word is replaced by something derived from the mental life of the dreamer, from sources unknown to him, and hence may very probably be itself a ‘derivative of a complex.’ It is not, therefore, altogether fantastic to suppose that the further associations connected with the elements of the dream are determined by no other complex than that which has produced the particular element itself, and that they will lead to the discovery of that complex. Let me give you another instance which may serve to show that, in the case of dreams, the facts bear out our expectations. The forgetting of proper names is really an excellent prototype of what happens in dream-analysis, only that in the former case one person alone is concerned, while in the interpretation of dreams there are two. When I forget a name temporarily, I am still certain that I know it, and by way of a détour through Bernheim’s experiment, we are now in a position to achieve a similar certainty in the case of the dreamer. Now this name which I have forgotten, and yet really know, eludes me. Experience soon teaches me that no amount of thinking about it, even with effort, is any use. I can, however, always think of another or of several other names instead of the forgotten one. When such a substitute name occurs to me spontaneously, only then is the similarity between this situation and that of dream-analysis evident. The dream-element also is not what I am really looking for; it is only a substitute for something else, for the real thing which I do not know and am trying to discover by means of dream-analysis. Again the difference is that when I forget a name I know perfectly well that the substitute is not the right one, whereas we only arrived at this conception of the dream-element by a laborious process of investigation. Now there also is a way in which, when we forget a name, we can by starting from the substitute, arrive at the real thing eluding our consciousness at the moment, i.e. the forgotten name. If I turn my attention to these substitute names and let further associations to them come into my mind, I arrive after a short or a long way round at the name I have forgotten, and in so doing I discover that the substitutes I have spontaneously produced had a definite connection with, and were determined by, the forgotten name.