This is, roughly, the method of psycho-analysis. It has been applied in various types of neurosis—hysterias, obsessions, phobias, etc. It has not always succeeded in removing the morbid conditions, but it has succeeded so often that it may legitimately be regarded as a method of treatment. As a matter of discovery it is arduous, and demands the highest skill and invention if it is to succeed. Incidentally it reveals masses of unpleasant ideas, of painful ideas, even of disgusting ideas; but, in the right hands, it leads to the healing of the mind. MACBETH. How does your patient, doctor? DOCTOR. Not so sick, my lord, As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, That keep her from her rest. MACBETH. Cure her of that; Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain; And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart? DOCTOR. Therein the patient Must minister to himself. And here, insensibly, we have passed into the World of Dreams. The morbid and the normal have come together. Dreams are the awaking of dormant complexes; they are transfigured experiences; they come into consciousness trailing clouds of emotion, and fill the dreamer’s imagination with mysterious images. It is here that the method of psycho-analysis most fascinates the student. It looks as if once more the “interpretation of dreams” had become a reality. The results of psycho-analysis, even when the method is applied with a master hand and the details are interpreted with a skill that comes only of a quick imagination, are not entirely convincing; but they are certainly such as to make more and more observation desirable. In the present short essay Professor Freud gives a sketch of psycho-analysis as it is applied to the interpretations of dreams. His examples, if they are enough to illustrate the theory, are hardly enough to prove it, but they are intended as an introduction to his more elaborate studies; and, hitherto, observers as they have increased in experience have gained in conviction. That the method goes a long way to prove that dreams are not a chaotic sport of the brain, but are a manifestation of ordered mental experience, is beyond doubt. It would be easy to show where the theory does not cover facts, but it is equally easy to show many facts that it does cover.