="Chance” Signs.= There are other clues to hidden inner processes, other sign-posts pointing to the cause of a neurosis.  Not only through dreams and through emotional reactions to certain words does the subconscious reveal its desires, but also through the little slips of the tongue and of the pen, the “chance” acts and unconscious mannerisms which are usually ignored as entirely insignificant.  When we “make a break” and say what we secretly mean but wish to hide from ourselves or others; when we forget an appointment which part of us really wishes to avoid, or forget a name with which we are perfectly familiar; when we lose the pen so that we cannot write or the desk key so that we cannot work; when we blunder and drop things and do what we did not mean to do; then we may know—­the normal as well as the nervous person—­that our subconscious minds with their repressed desires are trying to get the reins and are partially succeeding.

An example from my own life may illustrate the point.  In building a number of houses, I had occasion often to use the word studding, but on every occasion, I forgot the word and always had to end lamely by saying “those pieces of timber that go up and down.”  Each time the builder supplied the word, but the next time it was no more accessible.  Finally, the reason came to me.  One day when I was a little child I looked out of the window and cried, “Oh, see that great big beautiful horse.”  My grandmother exclaimed, “Sh! sh! that is a stud horse.”  Over-reaction to that impression repressed the word stud so successfully that as a grown woman I could not recall another word which happened to contain the same syllable.

During an analysis a patient of mine who had a mother-in-law situation on her hands told me a dream of the night before.  “I dreamed that my mother-in-law, who has really been very ill, was taken with a sinking-spell.  I rushed to the telephone to call the doctor, but found to my terror that I could not remember his number.”  “What is his number?” I asked, knowing that she ought to know it perfectly.  “Two-eight-nine-six,” she answered at once.  The number really was 2876.  Asleep and awake, her repressed desire for release from the mother-in-law’s querulous presence was attempting to have its way.  In the dream, she avoided calling the doctor by forgetting his number entirely.  Awake, she evaded the issue by remembering a wrong number.  In the dream she thinly disguised her desire by displacing the anxious emotion from the sense of her own guilty wishes to the idea of the mother-in-law’s death.  When confronted with this interpretation, the woman readily acknowledged its truth.