Those who have read Freud's little book, _Delusion and Dream_, an analysis of a psychological romance written by Wilhelm Jensen, will recall how extensive a fabric of plausibilities a delusion may build up in its defense in order at the same time to satisfy a repressed wish, and keep the true meaning of the subject's acts and thoughts from conscious attention. In the story which Freud has here taken as his subject for study, a young student of archæology has apparently conquered all adolescent erotic interest and has devoted himself whole-heartedly to his science. While at the ruins of ancient Pompeii, he finds a bas-relief containing the figure of a young woman represented in the act of walking with peculiar grace. A cast of this figure he brings home. His interest is curiously aroused. At first this interest appears to be scientific only, then æsthetic, and historical. Finally he builds up about it a complete romance. He becomes restless and very much of a misogynist, and is driven, he knows not why, again to the ruins. Here he actually meets the object of his dreams in the solitude of the excavated city. He allows himself to believe that the once living model of his treasured bas-relief has again come to life. For days he meets and talks with the girl, living all the while in a world of complete unreality, until she finally succeeds in revealing herself as the young woman who lives next door to him. It also appears that in their childhood he and this girl had been playmates, and that in spite of all his conscious indifference to her his unconscious interest was the source of his interest in the bas-relief and the motive which led him to return to Pompeii, where he unconsciously expected to find her. The interesting thing about all this for our present study is the series of devices, fictions, and compromises with reality which this repressed interest made use of while having its way with him, and at the same time resisting whatever might force it upon his conscious attention, where a recognition of its significance might result in a deliberate rejection. We shall not go into Freud's ingenious analysis of the mental processes at work here. The following passage is sufficient for our purpose: There is a kind of forgetting which distinguishes itself by the difficulty with which memory is awakened, even by strong appeals, as if a subjective resistance struggled against the revival. Such forgetting has received the name of "repression" in psychopathology ... about repression we can assert that certainly it does not coincide with the destruction, the obliteration of memory. The repressed material can not of itself break through as memory, but remains potent and effective.