It is at first difficult to believe that we are capable of this elaborate mental work while we are fast asleep.  However, a little investigation shows us to be more clever than we realize.  The subconscious mind, in its effort to satisfy both the repressing and the repressed impulses, carries on very complicated processes, disguises material by allowing one person to stand for another, two persons to stand for one, or one person to stand for two; it shifts emotion from important to trivial matters, dramatizes, condenses, and elaborates, with a skill that is amazing.  We are all of us very clever playwrights and makers of allegories—­in our sleep.  Also, we are all very clever at getting what we want, and the dream secures for us, in a way, something which we want very much indeed and which the world of social restraint or our own warped childish notion denies us.

Not every one can become an interpreter of dreams.  It takes a skilled and patient specialist thoroughly to understand the process.  But it is fortunate indeed that we possess such a valuable means of diagnosis when extraordinary conditions make it necessary to explore the subconscious in the search for trouble-making complexes.[42]

[Footnote 42:  For further study of the dream, see Freud:  Interpretation of Dreams; and General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis.]

=The Word-Test.= Although dreams furnish the main clues to buried complexes, they are by no means the only instrument of the psycho-analyst.  Another device, called the association word-test, has been developed by Dr. Carl Jung of Switzerland.  The analyst prepares a list of perhaps one hundred words, which he reads one by one to the patient, hoping in this way to strike some of the emotional reactions of which the patient himself is unaware.  The latter responds with the first word that comes into his mind, no matter how absurd it may seem.  The responses themselves are often significant, but the time that elapses is even more so.  It usually happens that it takes very much longer for some responses than for others.  If a patient’s average time is one or two seconds, some responses may take five or ten or twenty seconds.  Sometimes no word comes at all and the patient says that his mind is a blank.  He coughs or blushes, grows pale or trembles, showing all the signs of emotion even when he himself has no notion of the cause.  The significant word has hit upon a subconscious association with some emotional complex.  The blocking of the mind is an effort of the resistance to keep the painful ideas out of consciousness.  The telltale word then furnishes a starting point for further associations.

One of my patients blocked on the word “long.”  Instead of saying “short” or “pencil” or “road” or “day” or any other word which might naturally be associated with “long,” she laughed and said that no word would come.  Finally an emotional memory came to light.  It seems that this woman had been courted by a man whom she unconsciously loved, but whom she had “turned down” because she was ambitious for a career.  After the man had moved to another town, my patient heard that he was engaged to another girl.  She then realized that she loved him and began to long for him with her whole heart.  The meaningful word “long” thus led us to one of the emotional memories for which we were seeking.