All about your sub-un-non-conscious mind and desires you know not of. They may be doing you a great deal of harm. You may go crazy with them. Oh, yes! People are doing it right and left. Your dreaming you’re a hen-- [_Shakes his head darkly._ HENRIETTA Any fool can ridicule anything. MABEL [_Hastily, to avert a quarrel._] But what do you say it is, Henrietta? STEVE [_Looking at his watch._] Oh, if Henrietta’s going to start that! [_During HENRIETTA’S next speech settles himself at work-table and sharpens a lead pencil._ HENRIETTA It’s like this, Mabel. You want something. You think you can’t have it. You think it’s wrong. So you try to think you don’t want it. Your mind protects you--avoids pain--by refusing to think the forbidden thing. But it’s there just the same. It stays there shut up in your unconscious mind, and it festers. STEVE Sort of an ingrowing mental toenail. HENRIETTA Precisely. The forbidden impulse is there full of energy which has simply got to do something. It breaks into your consciousness in disguise, masks itself in dreams, makes all sorts of trouble. In extreme cases it drives you insane. MABEL [_With a gesture of horror._] Oh! HENRIETTA [_Reassuring._] But psychoanalysis has found out how to save us from that. It brings into consciousness the suppressed desire that was making all the trouble. Psychoanalysis is simply the latest scientific method of preventing and curing insanity. STEVE [_From his table._] It is also the latest scientific method of separating families. HENRIETTA [_Mildly._] Families that ought to be separated. STEVE The Dwights, for instance. You must have met them, Mabel, when you were here before. Helen was living, apparently, in peace and happiness with good old Joe. Well--she went to this psychoanalyzer--she was “psyched,” and biff!--bang!--home she comes with an unsuppressed desire to leave her husband. [_He starts work, drawing lines on a drawing board with a T-square._ MABEL How terrible! Yes, I remember Helen Dwight. But--but did she have such a desire? STEVE First she’d known of it. MABEL And she _left_ him? HENRIETTA [_Coolly._] Yes, she did. MABEL Wasn’t he kind to her? HENRIETTA Why yes, good enough. MABEL Wasn’t he kind to her. HENRIETTA Oh, yes--kind to her. MABEL And she left her good kind husband--! HENRIETTA Oh, Mabel! “Left her good, kind husband!” How naïve--forgive me, dear, but how bourgeoise you are! She came to know herself. And she had the courage! MABEL I may be very naïve and--bourgeoise--but I don’t see the good of a new science that breaks up homes. [_STEVE applauds._ STEVE In enlightening Mabel, we mustn’t neglect to mention the case of Art Holden’s private secretary, Mary Snow, who has just been informed of her suppressed desire for her employer. MABEL Why, I think it is terrible, Henrietta! It would be better if we didn’t know such things about ourselves. HENRIETTA No, Mabel, that is the old way. MABEL