y
so that we cannot work; when we blunder and drop things and do what we
did not mean to do; then we may know--the normal as well as the
nervous person--that our subconscious minds with their repressed
desires are trying to get the reins and are partially succeeding.

An example from my own life may illustrate the point. In building a
number of houses, I had occasion often to use the word studding, but
on every occasion, I forgot the word and always had to end lamely by
saying "those pieces of timber that go up and down." Each time the
builder supplied the word, but the next time it was no more
accessible. Finally, the reason came to me. One day when I was a
little child I looked out of the window and cried, "Oh, see that great
big beautiful horse." My grandmother exclaimed, "Sh! sh! that is a
stud horse." Over-reaction to that impression repressed the word stud
so successfully that as a grown woman I could not recall another word
which happened to contain the same syllable.

During an analysis a patient of mine who had a mother-in-law situation
on her hands told me a dream of the night before. "I dreamed that my
mother-in-law, who has really been very ill, was taken with a
sinking-spell. I rushed to the telephone to call the doctor, but found
to my terror that I could not remember his number." "What is his
number?" I asked, knowing that she ought to know it perfectly.
"Two-eight-nine-six," she answered at once. The number really was
2876. Asleep and awake, her repressed desire for release from the
mother-in-law's querulous presence was attempting to have its way. In
the dream, she avoided calling the doctor by forgetting his number
entirely. Awake, she evaded the issue by remembering a wrong number.
In the dream she thinly disguised her desire by displacing the anxious
emotion from the sense of her own guilty wishes to the idea of the
mother-in-law's death. When confronted with this interpretation, the
woman readily acknowledged its truth.

Even stammering, which has always been considered a physical disorder,
has been proved, by psycho-analysis, to be the sign of an emotional
disturbance. H. Addington Bruce reports the case of one of Dr. Brill's
patients, a young man who had been stammering for several years.
Observation revealed the fact that his chief difficulty was with
words beginning with K and although at first he firmly denied any
significance to the letter, he later confessed that his sweetheart
whose name