ys: "When we were in Glasgow." Invariably she makes this
mistake. The reason is almost certainly this: just before she left
Edinburgh she lost the one she loved most in life. She says: "When we
were in Glasgow" because the word Edinburgh would at once bring back
the painful memories connected with her loved one's death.

When I was teaching in Hampstead one of my pupils, a boy of sixteen,
came to me one day.

"That's all rot, what you say about wanting to forget things," he said.
"I went and left my walking-stick in a bus yesterday."

"Were you tired of it?" I asked.

"Tired of it?" he said indignantly. "Why, it was a beauty, a
silver-topped cane, got it from mother on my birthday. That proves
your theory is all wrong."

"Tell me about yesterday," I said.

"Well, I was going to a match at lord's, and it looked rather dull, so
mother told me I'd better take a gamp. I said it wasn't going to rain,
and took my cane, but I had just got on the top of a bus when down came
the rain in bucketfuls and I tell you I was wet to the skin."

"So you did mean to leave your cane behind?" I asked, with a smile.

"But I tell you I didn't!"

"You did, all the same. You kicked yourself because you hadn't taken
your mother's advice and brought a gamp. You deliberately left your
cane behind you because it had proved useless."

I must add that I failed to convince him.

Connected with forgetting are what Freud calls symptomatic acts. I
leave my stick or gloves behind when I am calling at a house: I
conclude that I want to go back there. I go to dinner at the
Thomsons', and at their front door I absent-mindedly take out my
latch-key. This may mean that I feel at home there; on the other hand,
it may mean that I wish I were at home. It is dangerous to dogmatise
about the unconscious.

I was sitting one night with Wilson, an old college friend of mine. We
talked of old times, and I remarked that he had been very lucky in his
lodgings during his college course.

"Yes," he said, "I was in the same digs all the five years. She was a
ripping landlady was Mrs.--Mrs.--Good Lord! I've forgotten her name!"

He tried to recall the name, but had to give it up. Two hours later,
as he rose to go, he exclaimed: "I remember the name now! Mrs. Watson!"

"What are your associations to the name Watson?" I asked.

"Associations? What do you mean?"

"What's the first thing that comes into your head in connection with
the name