discovered, often to the patient’s surprise. Things long forgotten come back to memory; circumstances that apparently had no relation to the present consciousness are found to be linked in sequence with it—emotions, unreasoning fears, anxieties, that apparently had no relation to any particular experience, are found at last to be part and parcel of things that happened long ago. Once the doctor has his cue, he can range in many directions, and probe the mind again and again, until he reveals multitudes of suppressed memories, forgotten ideas, forgotten elements of experience. He can even get back into early childhood, which, to the patient himself, leaves many and many a blank area in the memory. But always the doctor lights, sooner or later, on some complex experience in which the particular fear or anxiety arose. But now, if the case is a suitable one, a still stranger thing happens. When the forgotten experience has thus artfully been brought into the full light of consciousness, the patient finds himself satisfied with the explanation, and loses his particular fear. He can now go back over the whole history of its genesis; he can link up the old experience to the new, and so he attains once more satisfaction and peace of mind. Up till now he could not be reasoned out of his anxiety; he had always an answer for any explanation; he had always a fresh foolish reason for his fear. Now all this vanishes. He finds his mind once more running smoothly, and his “phobia” gone. The unreasoning dread has been tracked back to its lair, and its lair has been destroyed in the process. There are many other methods of achieving the same result; let this generalised sketch suffice. What now is the theory? The theory is that the mental experience or “complex” had, for some reason and by some mechanism, been submerged, or suppressed, or forgotten. Freud maintains that there is a fundamental tendency in the mind to suppress every experience that is associated with painful emotion. This doctrine is allied to Bain’s “Law of Conservation”—that painful experiences depress the vitality and tend to disappear, while pleasant experiences exalt the vitality and tend to remain in memory. At any rate, by some process the painful experience disappears from conscious memory, but it does not cease to exist. It may lie dormant, or it may work subconsciously, and throw up the emotional bubbles that continue, without a known reason, to excite the ordinary consciousness. But the complex, though deep and partly dormant, never gets beyond reach. By the method of concentration, by the use of “free associations,” by the following up of all the clues offered by the ideas “fished up,” the submerged complex can, element by element, be brought back. When once it is brought back the patient is restored, the dormant complexes once more resume their place in the total current of his experience, and the mind flows at peace.