she was taking a nap, I said to her, “You will not remember that I have talked to you.  You will stay asleep while I am talking and while you are asleep there will come to your mind the reasons why you are afraid to go to the Public Library.  When you waken, you will tell me all about it.”  Upon awakening, she said:  “Oh, do you know, I can tell you why I have always been afraid to go to the Public Library.  While I was in Parochial School, Father ——­ used to come in and tell us children to use the books out of the school library and never to go to the Public Library.”  I questioned her concerning her idea of the reason for such an injunction and what she thought was in the books which she was told not to read.  She hesitatingly stated that it was her idea, even in childhood, that the books dealt with topics concerning the tabooed subject of the birth of children and kindred matters.

=Smoldering Volcanoes.= Let us now consider those emotional experiences which seem far too compelling to be forgotten, but which may live within us for years without giving any evidence of their existence.  Memories like these are apt to be anything but a dead past.

Many of my own patients have uncovered emotional memories through simply talking out to me whatever came into their minds, laying aside their critical faculty and letting their minds wander on into whatever paths association led them.  This is known as the free-association method, and simple as it seems, is one of the most effective in uncovering memories which have been forgotten for years.  One of my patients, a refined, highly educated woman of middle age, had suffered for two years with almost constant nausea.  One day, after a long talk, with no suggestion on my part, only an occasional, “What does that remind you of?” she told with great emotion an experience which she had had at eighteen years of age, in which she had for a moment been sexually attracted to a boy friend, but had recoiled as soon as she realized where her impulse was leading her.  She had been so horrified at the idea of her degradation, so nauseated at what she considered her sin, that she had put it out of her mind, denied that such a thought had ever been hers, repressed the desire into the subconscious, where it had continued to function unsatisfied, unassimilated with her mature judgments.  Her nausea was the symbol of a moral disgust.  Physical nausea she was willing to acknowledge, but not this other thing.  Upon reciting this old experience, with every sign of the original shame, she cried:  “Oh, Doctor! why did you bring this up?  I had forgotten it.  I haven’t thought of it in thirty years.”  I reminded her that I couldn’t bring it up,—­I had never known anything about it.  With the emotional incoming of this memory and the saner attitude toward it which the mature woman’s mind was able to take, the nausea disappeared for good.  This case is typical of the psycho-neuroses and we shall have occasion to refer to it again.  The present emphasis is on the fact that an emotional memory may be buried for many years while it still retains the power of reappearing in more or less disguised manifestation.