An analytical French neurologist, Charcot, was not to be satisfied by words of Latin-Greek derivation.  Insisting upon the significance of the individual mental workings of each case, he and his pupil Janet began to unravel a tangle which has led to the present revolution in psychology.  For Freud, Jung and Adler took up the story where Janet left off.

Janet elaborated the ideas of a subconscious and an unconscious, a dissociation of the components of the mind, and a splitting of the personality.  Lumping the phenomena of amnesia, somnambulism, hypnotism, anesthesia, obsession and hysteria into the grand group of mental dissociations and disintegrations, he achieved a unification never considered possible before him.  Suggestion as a mode of cure was also emphasized and elaborated by him to an undreamed-of degree.

Freud, in 1895, studying a case of hysteria with Breuer, had attempted cure by the method of free association, attempting to get the hysteric to pour out her mental life.  Not succeeding, and his interest aroused by her continual references to her dreams, he discovered that by means of those dreams he could tap the subconscious and unconscious in regions hitherto inaccessible.  For in the dreams, ideas, persons, and experiences appeared that never came upon the stage of the conscious.  From that finding he developed the concept of repression, i.e., the relegation of a painful experience into the unconscious, and kept imprisoned there by the censor.  Also how there it became the complex, which, like a stage manager, never appeared before the footlights of the conscious, but determined its content just the same by inhibition or stimulation of any character or scene to be enacted upon it.

A complete critique of Freudianism cannot be attempted here.  But in relation to the endocrine system as controllers of nerve function in health and disease, a valid criticism can be made.  Firstly, the Freudian jargon, its technicalities and explanations, are metaphors.  Some may regard them as justifiable descriptions of mental processes.  But it certainly can be urged against them that they provide us with no idea concerning what is happening in the cells of the body and brain as explanation for the event, normal or abnormal, supposedly explained.  Words like sublimation or transference are figures of speech and nothing else.  Secondly, they ignore totally the powers of the vegetative apparatus, the viscera, muscles and secreting glands together, as originators and determiners of the wish and its adventures.

How utterly different, from the point of view of the physiologist, the two explanations are as pictures, can be seen from a single example.  The idea of repression, to the Freudian, means the pushing down into the subconscious of some experience.  Pushing down is a process controlled by the laws of physics:  it involves the concepts of matter and force.  Hence, the expression, as a description of a psychic