Therefore, by
adopting a passive attitude, by simply letting his thoughts wander, by
talking out to the physician everything that comes to his mind without
criticizing or calling any thought irrelevant or far-fetched, and
without rejecting any thought because of its painful character, the
patient is helped to trace down and unearth the troublesome complex
which may have been absolutely forgotten for many years. He is helped
to relive the childhood experiences back of the over-strong habits
which lasted into maturity.

=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-bask