But the golden flash of psychological insight eluded Janet. At bottom he had little respect for the concrete reality of the mental life of his patients. Although he talked the language of psychogeneticism, it had a poor and not a rich connotation in his mind. I think this is due to his too exclusive reliance upon hypnotism, for the mental set of the hypnotist is derogatory to most of the concrete productions of the patient. The patient, one feels with a shrug, will presently come to the important experience; why take the superimposed material too seriously? Then, too, the patient may be put in order by direct command. Janet relates with some pride how people in the waiting-room of his office would marvel when a woman, bent nearly double, would be admitted into his sanctum, presently to emerge, erect and cured--until the effect wore off. Freud learned a new respect for the concrete reality of mental life in his concentrated effort to divine the hidden conflict without resorting to hypnosis. His weakness as a hypnotist was in a sense the beginning of wisdom. A patient who is deeply hypnotized is but infrahuman. Barring commands which do violence to the moral code of the individual, the subject will passively execute the commands of the hypnotist. The patient descends from a complicated “nearly normal” person to a waxy caricature of a human being. The unhypnotized patient of Freud is in relatively full possession of all the resources of the ordinary waking self, and must be dealt with as a complex human being. The widest gateway to psychoanalytic development became the study of dreams. And here again we are dealing with something which came, not from laborious reflection upon underlying concepts, but from the urgencies of the clinical situation. Just as we found that Freud had taken up a new post of observation in practice before he discovered its implications in theory, we find that in such a detail as the investigation of dreams, his theoretical preoccupations contributed less than his everyday necessities. Freud’s patients continually thrust their dreams upon him; and he, now in pursuit of clues to what lay behind, presently took them seriously, and found in them many helpful indications of unspoken things. He would assist the free-fantasies of the patient by asking what came into his mind about any detail of the dream, and he attentively followed the long chains of superficially meaningless associations. It began to appear that Freud had stumbled upon, and then brilliantly elaborated the possibilities inherent in, a new way of using the mind. He trained his patients in a technique of free-fantasy which they could subsequently use for themselves as a supplement to the logical technique which society ostensibly tries to foster. It at once appeared that he had discovered a method of thinking which was applicable far beyond the confines of the clinic and which could be added to the repertory of the mind.