Finally the psychotherapist may go still one step further. After all it often seems inexplainable that just this or that emotional experience made such a deep and lasting impression while a thousand other experiences passed by without leaving any mischievous after-effect. It seems that indeed the conditions are still more complicated. That emotional disturbance operated dangerously perhaps only because it itself appealed to a suppressed desire and this seems to hold true especially for suppressed emotions of the sexual sphere. The desire for gratification in normal or abnormal channels was perhaps attached by the mind to some group of objects. It was completely suppressed but it left an abnormal tension in the central system. If now a chance experience touches on this group of ideas, there results an explosive reaction; and movements, convulsions, spasms, obsessions, and fears set in which get their particular character not through the secondary intrusion but from the primary desire. To discharge that intrusion leads therefore only to the elimination of those symptoms which resulted from it, but the primary disturbance goes on and any new chance intrusion will produce new explosions. The psychotherapist should therefore go deeper and relieve the mind from those primary desires which may belong to early youth and which are entirely forgotten. Even the method of automatic writing may here sometimes lead to an unveiling of those deepest layers of suppressed desires. In the same way a careful, subtle analysis of dreams may support the search for the hidden source of interference. We have spoken of the technical methods of the psychotherapist. It would be short-sighted to ignore the great manifoldness of secondary methods which he shares with the ordinary intercourse between man and man, the methods which the teacher uses in the schoolroom, which the parents use in the nursery, which the neighbor uses with his neighbor, methods which build up the mind, methods which train the mind, methods which reenforce good habits and suppress unwholesome ones, methods which stimulate sound emotions and inhibit a quarrelsome temper, methods which indeed are not less important in the psychiatric clinic and in the hospital than in our daily life, and which certainly have central importance in that borderland region which is the particular working field of the psychotherapist. X THE MENTAL SYMPTOMS