The technique of therapy consisted in using clues to facilitate the patient’s search for relief. The problem was to discover the nature of the patient’s conflict and to volunteer interpretations for the sake of helping the patient to dare to bring into full consciousness the unavowed impulse which had once frightened his socially adjusted self into frantic repression. This involved the interpretation of the symptom as a compromise product of the patient’s ideal of conduct; and the out-of-conscious impulse, which, though denied access to the full consciousness of the sufferer, possessed enough strength to procure partial gratification. The symptom was thus a symptom of conflict between the socially adapted portion of the self and the unadapted impulses of the personality, and the symptom was a compromise between partial gratification of the illicit and partial punishment by the conscience. The particular form of the “conflict” depended upon the traumatic experience and the antecedent history of the individual. Far more important than these therapeutic elaborations is the shift in standpoint which made them possible. Since Freud was on the search for the literal by way of the symbolic, he raised hitherto neglected manifestations of human behavior to the dignity of significant symbols, wrote them out, and introduced them into the literature of human behavior. There could be no sharper illustration of the prepotency of “mental set” for the seeing of “facts” than the difference between the clinical reports of Freud and Janet. Freud, convinced that the eluctable energies of the organism could betray themselves in every image and in every gesture, painstakingly recorded the dreams and day-fantasies of his patients. Janet, who continued to assume that dreams were nonsensical confusions attributable to the diminished tension of the sleeping organism, seldom made any allusion to dreams. His pellucid description of grimaces, gestures, sentiments, and theories of his patients led back to relatively recent moments when the patient failed of adjustment. This failure of the patient to mobilize his energies in smooth adaptation to the exigencies of social reality was then imputed to a defective biopsychical mechanism, to a lowered “psychological tension,” due to a miscellany of possible causes, among which was mentioned “the exhaustive effects of emotional excitement.” Therapy consisted in restoring the capacity of the individual to mobilize and deploy his energies at the highest “levels” of adjustment. This was to be achieved by a variety of means--by hypnotic suggestion, rest in a simplified environment, and the usual repertory of the psychotherapist.