Freud’s theory of what he saw began modestly enough, leaned heavily upon Charcot, Bernheim, and Breuer, and was mostly founded upon observations made upon patients who were handled by hypnosis and not by the new procedure which later was called psychoanalysis. He published a contribution to the theory of the psychoneuroses in which he laid down the proposition that a distinction could be drawn between one group, the anxiety neuroses, which depended on mental conflict, and the actual neuroses, which were not due to mental conflict but to masturbation and coitus interruptus. In the first case, mental energy was converted into bodily symptoms, and in the latter case bodily energy was supposed to be converted into bodily symptoms. In Freud’s early articles there is little to forecast the course which he was to follow as his brilliant imagination viewed the behavior of the individual from the new vantage ground which he had discovered.[5] Whether his particular theories survive or fall, the standpoint which he achieved by ruthlessly applying his method is of the greatest value. His method, which grew from the necessities of an exasperated physician, led him _systematically to treat every manifestation of the individual as part of a related whole_. Freud’s mental set had been furnished by the data of hypnosis, which seemed to show that patients suffer from reminiscences. When he dropped hypnosis and tried to force recollections, his mental set had not altered, for he was still in search of the original, the traumatic episode. When he asked his patients to say anything that came into their heads, he was still hunting the elusive memory of a definite early experience. But quite without realizing it, his original mental set had widened, and with momentous consequences for his own subsequent development. If one were given to exaggerations, one could say that the world of psychological investigation had suddenly begun to turn on a new axis. What was the nature of this new mental set? Intently watching his patients, not for word for word accounts of what had happened, and looking upon everything else as “irrelevant,” Freud learned to look for meanings and not for reports. Every dream, every phrase, every hesitation, every gesture, every intonation, every outburst began to take on significance as possible allusions to the “traumatic” episode. Allusions to hated objects, reminiscent of a brother, failure to mention a hated sister until days had passed, although other members of the family had been passed in review--every deviation from comprehensiveness--was eagerly scrutinized for the clue it might afford.