One other example of episodic amnesia I will cite, inasmuch as, aside from the question of conservation, it is of practical importance, being typical of experiences which lead to obsessions of phobia. The subject, O. N., had an intense fear of towers such as might contain bells that might ring. She had no recollection of the first occasion when the fear occurred or of any experience which might have given rise to it, and, of course, could give no explanation of the obsession. Neither in abstraction or hypnosis could any related memories be evoked, but by automatic writing she “unconsciously” described an emotional and dramatic scene which was the occasion of the first occurrence of the fear and which had taken place some twenty-five years previously when she was a young girl. With the reason for the amnesia we are not particularly concerned at present excepting so far as it serves to make clear the distinction between recollection and conservation, and to throw light on the nature of the latter. The episodes in both these instances were of a strongly emotional character. Now we have known for many years from numerous observations that emotion tends to disrupt the mind and to dissociate the experiences which give rise to the affective state so that they cannot be brought back into consciousness. We may particularize further and, making use of the known impulsive force of emotion, attribute the dissociation (or inhibition) in many cases to a conflict between certain ideas belonging to the experience and other opposing ideas which, with the emotion, they have awakened. The impulsive force of the latter ideas, being the stronger, dissociates, or, to use the expressive term introduced by Freud, represses, the former. The principle of dissociation by conflict has been formulated and elaborated by Freud in his well-known theory which has been made use of to explain all functional amnesias. It is not necessary to go as far as that, nor does the theory as such concern us now. It is sufficient if in certain cases the amnesia (or dissociation) is a dissociation (repression) induced by the conative force of conflicting emotion. If so we should expect that the amnesia would be of a temporary nature and would continue only so long as the conflict and dissociating force continued. In any favorable moment when repression ceased or failed to be operative, as in hypnosis or abstraction, reproduction (recollection) could occur. But this requires that the registration of the experience should be something specific that can be dissociated without obliteration. And, further, it must be something that can be so conserved, somehow and somewhere, _during dissociation_ that, as in the case of reproduction by automatic writing, it can escape the influence of the repressing force and express itself autonomously, i.e., without the expressed memory of the experience entering the personal consciousness. To this we shall return later.