The Science of the Mind 557 



especially active as a cause of dreams, and thus he was led to his 

 now familiar theory of the interpretation of dreams. 



The work of Professor Freud, his disciples and his critics, 

 has thrown a flood of light upon the working of the human mind, 

 and led to curious alterations of our views upon dreams, insanity, 

 myths, art, and religion. In dealing with patients who were suf- 

 fering mainly from functional diseases of the nervous system, 

 Freud found that what had been regarded as the symptoms of the 

 disease, such as paralysis of the limbs, blindness, deafness, and 

 mutism, were frequently connected in some definite way with 

 the original onset of the disease; blindness, for example, might 

 date from some violently painful occurrence of which the patient 

 had been a witness. This connection was not as a rule recognised 

 by the patient's waking consciousness, but it revealed itself oc- 

 casionally to the doctor when the patient was hypnotised ; some- 

 times also it was brought out by the dreams which the patient 

 described ; but in general the ordinary consciousness of the subject 

 resisted all attempts to probe back to the original cause of the 

 disease. 



Turning his attention to dreams, Freud found that in the 

 case of normal individuals also there were painful experiences, 

 never revived in the fully conscious mind, but playing a great 

 part in the dreams of the subject, appearing there in a more or less 

 disguised form ; and that the interpretation of the dream in both 

 normal and abnormal subjects invariably led back to some wish 

 or desire of the individual, which it was impossible for him, for 

 physical, moral, or social reasons, to realise in waking life. The 

 dream was the mimic realisation of the wish. 



The instinctive or voluntary forgetting Freud called Repres- 

 sion; the repressed ideas were not, however, destroyed, but were 

 constantly endeavouring to force their way back into conscious- 

 ness. He gave the name of the "unconscious" to the mass of 

 repressed memories of all kinds. For the repression of a wish 

 involves also the repression of the whole system of experience to 



