In the practice of psycho-analysis, too, the displacement of emotional attitudes originally adopted with reference to the parents has been shown to play an important part, though the therapeutic effect of the method is not, as has sometimes erroneously been supposed, due to the simple action of suggestion[144]. Psycho-analysis aims at producing a state of greater co-ordination in the patient's mind by giving him an understanding of the nature and direction of his unconscious mental trends, thus putting him in a position to bring about a state of relative harmony between the different impulses which formerly, by their mutual antagonisms, were responsible for the production of the neurosis. A mere understanding of the nature of the unconscious processes involved is however, as has frequently been shown, powerless to effect the desired result, unless the conative and affective sides of these processes are also loosened from their fixations in the Unconscious and made available for use in other directions. It is here that the transference of tendencies originally directed to the parents becomes important. Just as, in the first unfolding and development of the child's emotional capacities, the direction of the love impulses on to the parents was the means of bringing the child beyond the primitive stages of auto-erotism and narcissism, so now in the emotional re-education that psycho-analysis involves, the further process of displacement of the parent love on to new objects is one of fundamental importance and is often an essential condition of the necessary readjustment and integration of the emotional life. Not of course that the parent-love is the only impulse requiring displacement in this way, but, inasmuch as the Œdipus Complex is (as Freud has put it) the nuclear complex of the neuroses, it is just the emotions that centre round the parents that usually constitute the most fundamental and far-reaching, as well as in themselves the most massive and weighty, of those that need readjustment as regards their object. In this process of readjustment, the analyst himself--as is now well recognised--usually plays a highly important, though a transitory, rôle; the emotions loosened from their fixations by the process of analysis being temporarily displaced on to his person, (on their way to more suitable and permanent objects) both because he is the first available object, and because his position of authority as the conductor of the analysis naturally suits him for the part[145]. [Sidenote: Transference and the cure of neuroses]