=Displacement.= Association or grouping is, then, an intrinsic power of mind; but as all life seems to be built on opposites—­light and darkness, heat and cold, love and hate—­so mind, which is capable of association, is capable also of displacement or the splitting apart of elements which belong together.  There is such a thing as the simple breaking up of complexes, when education or experience or neglect separate ideas and emotions which had been previously welded together; but displacement is another matter.  Here there is still a path between idea and emotion; they still belong to the same complex, but the connection is lost sight of.  The impulse or emotion attaches itself to another substitute idea which is related to the first but which is more acceptable to the personality.  Sometimes the original idea is forgotten; repressed, or dissociated into the subconscious, as in anxiety neurosis; and sometimes it is merely shorn of its emotional interest and remembered as an unrelated or insignificant idea, as in compulsion neurosis.

=Transference.= Another kind of displacement which seems hard to believe possible until it is repeatedly encountered in intelligent human beings is the process called transference, by which everybody at some time or other acts toward the people he meets, not according to rational standards but according to old unconscious attitudes toward other people.  Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the people who surrounded us when we were children; and now when we meet a new person we are likely unconsciously to say to ourselves—­not, “This person has eyebrows like my mother, or a voice like my nurse,” or, “This person bosses me around as my father used to do,” but, “This is my mother, this is my nurse, this is my father.”  Whereupon we may proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the original person in childhood.

Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and behaving toward the one as if he were that other.  Analysis has discovered that many a man’s hostile attitude toward the state or religion or authority in general, is nothing more than this kind of displacement of his childhood’s attitude toward authority in the person of his perhaps too-domineering father.  Many a woman has married a husband, not for what he was in himself, but because she unconsciously identified him with her childish image of her father.

Students of human nature have always recognized the kind of displacement which transfers the sense of guilt from some major act or attitude to a minor one which is more easily faced, just as Lady Macbeth felt that by washing her hands she might free herself from her deeper stain.  This is a frequent mechanism in the psychoneuroses—­not that neurotics are likely to have committed any great crime, but that they feel subconsciously that some of their wishes or thoughts are wicked.