This will appear more credible if we study a few cases of the forgetting of past experiences, in which the forgotten experience seemed to continue to have an influence upon the mind of the individual, not merely in dreams but in waking life. These will show us that not only unfulfilled desires may be repressed and forgotten, but that we may repress the memory of experiences so striking or important as to appear unforgettable. Such examples are best to be found in the records of cases of cures in military nerve hospitals. One has already been given, in which a soldier had almost completely forgotten his marriage.

The continued influence of the forgotten experience is shown more clearly, however, in the following case described by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers,* which bids fair to become a classical example. It is the case of a young medical officer who even before the war had a horror of closed-in spaces, such as tunnels and narrow cells. He would never travel by the tube railway, and was seized with fear when in a train which passed through a tunnel. One can imagine his intense distress when on entering a dug-out he was given a spade and told it was for use in case he was buried alive. His sleep was greatly disturbed, and his health became so bad that he was invalided home. Instructions to keep his thoughts from the war and to dwell exclusively on pleasant topics proved useless. He had terrifying dreams of warfare, from which he would awake, sweating profusely, and thinking he was dying. At this stage he came under the care of Dr. Rivers. The patient was asked to try to remember any dreams he might have and to record any memories which came into his mind while thinking over the dreams. Shortly afterwards he had a dream, and as he lay in bed thinking it over there came into his mind an incident which seemed to have happened when he was about three years of age, and which had so greatly affected him at the time that it now seemed to the patient almost impossible that it could ever have been forgotten. He recalled that as a little boy, he and his friends used to visit an old man in a house near his own, and to take him odd articles discarded at home, in return for which they received a copper or two. On one occasion he went alone, down the long, dark passage leading to the old man's home, and on turning back found that the door at the opening of the passage had banged to and he was unable to escape. Just then a dog in the passage began to bark savagely, and the little child was terrified, and continued so until he was released. After another dream the patient woke up to find himself repeating "McCann, McCann." It occurred to him, suddenly, that this was the name of the old man. Inquiry of the parents of the patient revealed the fact that an old rag-and-bone man had lived in such a house as the patient remembered, and that his name was McCann.

* "A Case of Claustrophobia," Lancet, Aug. 18, 1917. Republished in Instinct and the Unconscious: Cambridge University Press, 1921.

The result of this recovery of memory, with the explanation of his abnormal fears of closed-in spaces, had a great effect on the patient. A few days afterwards he lost his fear of closed-in spaces, and he afterwards travelled in tube railways and tunnels without discomfort. Indeed, he was so confident of himself at once that he wished Dr. Rivers to lock him up in some subterranean chamber of the hospital as a proof of his cure.

The particular point to be noted here is that an entirely forgotten experience continued, apparently, to have an influence upon conscious mental life. Other points of interest are these: that the original experience was an intensely emotional and disturbing one; that the experience was recalled through reflecting on a dream; that the conscious effort of will to banish the unreasoning fears had no effect; that the fearsome experience, though repressed until forgotten, found its way out to consciousness through the repeated emotions of fear. This constant fear was stimulated by being in closed-in spaces, that is, by situations similar to the original one, though that was forgotten.

It is true that we need not in such a case regard the memory of the savage dog incident as remaining active in some independent but unconscious manner. In accordance with the well-known laws of association, the following might have happened: that, after the dog incident, narrow shut-in spaces recalled the incident, and so roused the fear. Thus an intimate association was set up between the idea of a shut-in space and the fear which continued independently of the memory of the actually originating cause. Such forgotten unconscious associations are common. It is still true, however, to speak of the repressed memory or experience influencing present consciousness, and the main problem in cases like that above is to explain the forgetting of such striking incidents, more especially when they occur later than early childhood.

A case fundamentally similar, but of a milder type, came under my own observation. A friend of mine, to all appearance a perfectly normal young man, experienced, though only occasionally, and for a few minutes at a time, intense emotions of fear, for no apparent reason. At his urgent request, after he had heard something of the Freudian psychology, I sought to find the explanation. I tried to analyse his dreams for him, and also submitted him to the word association test, to be described later. As the result of this examination, there was brought back to his mind the memory of intense fears he had occasionally experienced as a boy when troubled about certain sex matters, of which he had been left in entire ignorance. We now discovered that the circumstances, which had recently caused the mysterious paroxysms of fear, had certain connections with the imaginative fears of boyhood and with the causes of those fears; an explanation of his recent fears which gave him great relief, and seemed to make possible a new attitude towards situations which had tended to revive them, so that the fears have never recurred since.