PSYCHOANALYSIS is primarily a sys tem or method of medical practice which aims to interpret and treat various visceral, nervous and mental disorders through their most funda mental causes in the nature and life of the in dividual. These causes are discovered and a readjustment of the factors they represent is effected through the means which the name sug gests, an analysis of the psyche or mind. This name was chosen by Sigmund Freud of Vienna to express the nature of his work when he elaborated this method in his experience with hysteria and other psychoneuroses. It was through his experience working with Breuer in hypnotizing such patients that he came to a realization of the existence and continued ac tivity of certain factors or groups of factors belonging to the mental life, which survived in the unconscious when consciousness no longer remembered their existence. He found that the bringing of these hidden factors into conscious memory or into free activity through hypnosis and the obtaining thus of an emotional reaction to them, even after a long period of years in which they were consciously forgotten, gave relief from various physical and mental symp toms. As he proceeded with his work he came to realize that hypnosis was by no means a completely satisfactory method of procedure. Many patients could not submit to hypnosis; the results were not always sufficiently perma nent as it was more or less difficult for con sciousness to retain the effect of the abreaction of affect or emotion which had been obtained during the hypnotic state. He felt that there should be more co-operation between the pa tient and the physician, which could be better realized and more effectively handled if the patient retained consciousness and brought his own reason also to bear upon the problems and the facts involved. This would be a slower but a more effective method and one which would have an application to a larger class of people. The method consists briefly in a series of inter views extending over varying periods of time owing to the mass of mental material to be ex amined and to the emotional obstructions which have to be patiently understood and overcome as this long buried and highly emotional material is brought to light. The working principles of psy choanalysis lie in the acceptance of an uncon scious side to the mental or psychic life, which forms the greater part of any individual life. This unconscious material should naturally be the 'reserve material conserved from the past lying ready for continual passage over into the superficial conscious life to furnish material for thought and action. It should be the store house of all past experience and of the sum of feeling and tendency which constitute individual character. The way into consciousness should be sufficiently open so that such material may be selectively chosen according to practical and creative needs and yet so well guarded that su perfluous material shall not thrust itself dis tractingly into the field of thought and action. Therefore a certain amount of repression is necessary to hold the psychic material in useful control.
The ideas and the feelings which belong to past experience and which form the mental con tent of each individual, however, have not al ways established themselves in the past in proper proportion and relation to the facts of life and toward each other. There is a good deal of exaggeration, disproportion and distor tion in any life and an excess of these things, from the point of view of psychoanalysis, con stitutes a neurosis. Here repression has become excessive because emphasis was laid upon cer tain factors probably in infancy, which would thrust into undue attention certain things which society and the individual's own social, ethical and wsthetic sense would tend to banish. Yet these factors had not been properly attended to before repression occurred. Their exaggerated emotional importance had not been relieved by a reaction to them, "abreaction') Freud has called it, at the time when they were established. Therefore it is the work of psychoanalysis to search the unconscious for the existence of such hidden factors and bring them out through an understanding and interpretation of them and a recognition of their actual place in the econ omy of the child's and the adult's growth and elopment. The discovery of these, their cor rect appraisal and then the readjustment of them to the claims of reality and the demands of the social environment in which the indi vidual has to live must be made by the patient with the guidance and interpretative aid of the psychoanalyst. The searching of the uncon scious takes place chiefly through the interpreta tion of the dreams of the night, when accord ing to the theory of psychoanalysis the uncon scious emotional nature, which manifests itself as wish, speaks most freely, conscious control being largely withdrawn. Enough of the latter is present, at least at the moment of waking and remembering the dream, to cause the latter to take a distorted form, so that the wish, the pure expression of the unconscious impulses, is much disguised. For this reason psychoanaly sis in the use of the dream is dependent fur ther upon the free associations which are called forth by relating and thinking over the dream. These too are imperfect and fragmentary but, because they belong in the endless chain of mental associations, disclose more and more of the mental background out of which the dream arose. It is the endeavor of psychoanalysis to 'watch these, follow them patiently as they draw themselves together and gather insight and in terpretation from them. Daydreams are of the same nature as the dreams of the only a little more under control of conscious intellec tual thought. From the same source are cer tain sudden acts, facial expressions, attitudes, mistakes in speaking, sudden forgetungs, spon taneous displays of feeling. They all arise from the unconscious depth of the mental life to appear on the conscious surface. These are also watched and utilized in psychoanalysis for the discovery and understanding of the hidden mental life.