capable of
association, is capable also of displacement or the splitting apart of
elements which belong together. There is such a thing as the simple
breaking up of complexes, when education or experience or neglect
separate ideas and emotions which had been previously welded together;
but displacement is another matter. Here there is still a path between
idea and emotion; they still belong to the same complex, but the
connection is lost sight of. The impulse or emotion attaches itself to
another substitute idea which is related to the first but which is
more acceptable to the personality. Sometimes the original idea is
forgotten; repressed, or dissociated into the subconscious, as in
anxiety neurosis; and sometimes it is merely shorn of its emotional
interest and remembered as an unrelated or insignificant idea, as in
compulsion neurosis.

=Transference.= Another kind of displacement which seems hard to
believe possible until it is repeatedly encountered in intelligent
human beings is the process called transference, by which everybody at
some time or other acts toward the people he meets, not according to
rational standards but according to old unconscious attitudes toward
other people. Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the
people who surrounded us when we were children; and now when we meet a
new person we are likely unconsciously to say to ourselves--not, "This
person has eyebrows like my mother, or a voice like my nurse," or,
"This person bosses me around as my father used to do," but, "This is
my mother, this is my nurse, this is my father." Whereupon we may
proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the
original person in childhood.

Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and
behaving toward the one as if he were that other. Analysis has
discovered that many a man's hostile attitude toward the state or
religion or authority in general, is nothing more than this kind of
displacement of his childhood's attitude toward authority in the
person of his perhaps too-domineering father. Many a woman has married
a husband, not for what he was in himself, but because she
unconsciously identified him with her childish image of her father.

Students of human nature have always recognized the kind of
displacement which transfers the sense of guilt from some major act or
attitude to a minor one which is more easily faced, just as _Lady
Macbeth_ felt that by w