[42] For f urther 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.
"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.
Even stammering, which has always been considered a physical disorder, has been proved, by psycho-analysis, to be the sign of an emotional disturbance. H. Addington Bruce reports the case of one of Dr. Brill's patients, a young man who had been stammering for several years. Observation revealed the fact