denly, as he sat reading in his home one evening, all his old
symptoms swept over him,--the pains in his head and legs, the pounding
of the heart, the "all-gone" sensations as though he were going to die
on the spot. He became almost completely dissociated, but through it
all he clung to the idea which he had learned,--namely that this
experience was not really physical as it seemed but was the result of
some idea, and would pass. He did not tell any one of the attack,
ignored it as much as possible, and waited. In a few minutes he was
himself again. Then he looked for the cause and realized that the
article he was reading was one he had read several months previous,
when suffering most severely from the whole train of symptoms. When
the familiar words had again gone into his mind, they had pressed the
button for the whole physiological experience which had once before
been associated with them. This is the same mechanism as that involved
in Prince's case, Miss Beauchamp, who became completely dissociated at
one time when a breeze swept across her face. When Dr. Prince looked
for the cause, he found that once before she had experienced certain
distressing emotions while a breeze was fanning her cheek. The
recurrence of the physical stimulation had been sufficient to bring
back in its entirety the former emotional complex.

=Another Kind of Association.= One of my women patients illustrates
another kind of association-mechanism, based not on proximity in time
but proximity of position in the body. This woman had complained for
years of "bladder trouble" although no physical examination had been
able to reveal any organic difficulty. She referred to a constant
distress in the region of the bladder and was never without a certain
red blanket which she wrapped around her every time she sat down.
During psycho-analysis she recounted an experience of years before
which she had never mentioned to anybody. During a professional
consultation her physician, a married man, had suddenly seized her and
exclaimed, "I love you! I love you!" In spite of herself, the woman
felt a certain appeal, followed by a great sense of guilt. In the
conflict between the physiological reflex and her moral repugnance,
she had shunted out of consciousness the real sex-sensation and had
replaced it with a sensation which had become associated in her
subconscious mind with the original temptation. Since the nerves from
the genital region and from the bl