=Resisting the Probe.= Naturally, it is not all fair sailing.  The subconscious impulses which repressed the painful complex in the first place still shrink from uncovering it.  In many cases the resistance is very strong.  It, therefore, often happens that after a time the patient becomes restive; he begins to criticize the doctor and to ridicule the method.  His mind goes blank and no thought will come; or he refuses to tell what does come.  The nearer the probe comes to the sore spot, the greater the pain of the repressing impulses and the stronger the resistance.  Usually a strange thing happens; the patient, instead of consciously remembering the forgotten experiences, begins to relive them with his original emotions transferred on to the doctor.  Depending upon what person of his childhood he identifies with him, the patient develops either a strong affection or an intense antagonism to the physician, attitudes called in technical terms positive and negative transference.  If the analyst is skilful, he is able to circumvent all the subterfuges of the resisting forces and to uncover and modify the troublesome complexes.  Sometimes this can be accomplished at one sitting, but more often it requires long hours of conversation.  Freud has spent three years on a single difficult case, and very frequently the analysis drags out through weeks or months.  The amount of mental material is so great, especially in a person who is no longer young, that every analysis would probably be an interminable affair if it were not for three valuable ways of finding the clue and picking up the scent somewhere near the end of the trail.  The first of these clues is nothing else than so despised a phenomenon as the patient’s own night-dreams, which turn out to be not meaningless jargon, as we have supposed, but significant utterances of the inner man.

=The Message of the Dream.= When Freud rescued dreams from the mental scrap-basket and learned how to piece them together so that their message to man about himself became for the first time intelligible, he furnished the human race with what will probably be considered its most valuable key to the hidden mysteries of the mind.  Freeing the dream from the superstition of olden times and from the neglect of later days, Freud was the first to discover that it is part and parcel of man’s mental life, that it has a purpose and a meaning and that the meaning may be scientifically deciphered.  It then invariably reveals itself to be not a prophecy for the future but an interpretation of the present and of the past, an invaluable synopsis of the drama which is being staged within the personality of the dreamer.