It is rather pleasing to recall the situation exciting anger when the original emotion is short-circuited, as it were, allowing a pleasurable, gossipy vituperation against the offender without the initially unpleasant stage of anger. In fact the subject may re-experience a little of the unpleasant humiliation through imaginative stimulus, if the pleasantly reactive stage is successful enough to compensate. If the subject is aware he has a sympathetic hearer, it is far easier to pass over the initially unpleasant stage of the reinstated anger and enjoy a hostile, gossipy reaction. The writer in the course of the study became so intimately acquainted with the private emotional life of the subjects studied and had been a sympathetic listener of the emotional experiences so long, that after the period of observation had ended, he would find himself the recipient of emotional confidences which the subjects took pleasure in relating to him. Says one on reporting, “I really was not interested so much in the scientific side of this emotion as I was to tell you of my resentment, and as I look over it now, I am really aware that I assumed a scientific interest as a means of gaining full sympathy and giving me full freedom to speak everything in mind.” Another subject says, “I went to tell X. for I believed he would get angry too and I hoped that he would.” The same situation does not usually allow anger to continue to reappear in its unpleasant form, for repeated appearance tends to eliminate the active unpleasant stage. An emotion of anger which has been unsuccessfully expressed may continue to reappear in consciousness again and again. Crowded out, it will suddenly return at times by chance associations. It may become so insistent that it is an unpleasant distraction from business affairs and the subject must find some sort of reaction to satisfy it. F. observes, “I could not do my work. Just as I would get started, the idea would reappear suddenly and I would find myself angry, tending to think cutting remarks and planning what I should do. Each time I tried to escape from it, it would come back again. Finally I determined deliberately to get rid of it. I recalled all the good qualities of X., what favors he had bestowed upon me and in fact felt quite friendly toward him. Before I had finished, the anger had disappeared and did not return. Later, as I recalled the situation incidentally, I felt indifferent toward it.” Such deliberate behavior is unusual. The reaction to an emotion is mostly involuntary. In many instances, when emotion is prolonged, it is much like a trial and error process, one reaction after another is tried out in imagination until a rather successful one is found. This reappearance of an emotion when it has been repressed gives opportunity for a new trial and mode of attack.