Indeed, there is reason for suspecting that all functional nervous and mental troubles, no matter what their immediate cause, are traceable to fear-memories of remote occurrence, dating usually from the days of childhood. Certainly it is possible to detail from recent medical practice innumerable cases in support of this view. Not to be tedious, I will give only one or two, selecting first a case of Doctor Coriat’s, in which the patient, a middle-aged woman, had for years been tormented by an increasing fear that she would go insane, and that, if insane, she would inevitably injure some member of her family. The poor woman had worn herself out brooding over this, and was gradually qualifying for commitment to some institution. But Doctor Coriat could not find, either in her physical condition or in the facts of her family history, anything to warrant her belief that she was doomed to become insane. Suspecting, therefore, that this belief was merely a hysterical outgrowth of some forgotten shock in her previous life, and knowing that in sleep such latent memories have a tendency to emerge momentarily into the field of consciousness, he questioned her regarding the frequency and content of her dreams. “I dream a great deal,” she told him, “but I never have a clear remembrance of what I have dreamed about.” Yet, when hypnotised and again questioned regarding the dreams, she was able to detail many of them. One in particular interested Doctor Coriat. It was of a recurrent character, and was identified by the patient as having first been dreamed at the time she began to worry over her condition. It was, in fact, a dream in which she saw herself insane. “Had anything unpleasant happened to you the day before you first had that dream?” Doctor Coriat now inquired of his hypnotised patient. “Nothing that I can remember, except that I went to a friend’s funeral.” “The funeral of a very dear friend?” “Not exactly—just a friend.” “But that should not have had such a disturbing effect on your mind. Did anything happen at the funeral?” “I saw a woman there whose eyes frightened me.” “And why did they frighten you?” “Because they reminded me of a preacher I used to know when I was a little girl. He was a revivalist, and I always thought he was crazy. I went to his meetings, and got terribly worked up, and it frightened me very much. I thought I would go crazy too, just like the preacher.” To Doctor Coriat it seemed unnecessary to ask any more questions. As he saw it, the haunting dread of insanity was nothing but the continuation in consciousness of the forgotten memory of the childhood fright, revived by subconscious association of the woman at the funeral with the preacher whose rabid exhortations had inspired the patient with such terror. On this theory he utilised the resources of medical psychology to deprive the baneful memory-image of its power to harm, and soon had the satisfaction of being able to record a perfect cure.