It is well to understand what is meant by the transference of the affects to the physician. Any successful practitioner knows well that the best results are obtained in the case of an obedient and devoted patient. The bond between the patient and physician is powerful, and is constantly used as a lever towards health. Where the treatment is psychic, and for suffering which the patient is apt to believe is ' worse than pain,' the debt of gratitude is greater. Only persons of high moral character are fitted to practise medicine at all, and the psycho-analyst above all others should be well balanced, and have perfect control over his own sex-life, since it is obvious he is constantly called upon to investigate and direct the sex-life of others. As complete self-knowledge as possible is advisable, and Freud considers that those who use this method should themselves undergo psycho-analysis as a matter of training. Here again we find our analogy in the realm of surgery, for no oculist would dream of prescribing glasses for a patient without having first ascertained and corrected his own error of refraction.

In conclusion, what is the aim and scope of this therapy? Is there sufficient justification for digging about and unearthing the primitive and instinctive roots of human nature? We believe, and for this belief there is already abundant clinical evidence, that when the psychoneurotic understands the meaning of his phobias, obsessions, and hysterical symptoms, they will disappear. I cannot do better than quote here Freud's own words on this subject: 'I must explain what I mean by the general effects of our work and how I build hopes upon them. . . . You know that the psychoneuroses are distortive substitutive gratifications of impulses, the existence of which one must deny to himself and others. Their capacity to exist rests on this distortion and misjudgment. With the solution of the riddle they present, and with the acceptance of this solution by the patients, these morbid states become incapable of existence. There is hardly anything like it in medicine: in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits whose charm is broken as soon as one can tell them their secretly concealed name.

The success which the therapy can have in the individual must also appear in the masses.'

But before this therapy can be made generally serviceable for the suffering public, it must be understood and appraised by the practising physician. He will then no longer urge his patient to suppress those hideous tormenting ideas which hitherto we have not had the art to relieve, but he will induce him to unburden himself and will put him in the way of cure. From the surface psychic material unfolded in the history of the case he will strike down to the psychic materies morbi in the unconscious. It is a case of 'deep calling unto deep.' This form of practice is quite obviously not suited to the temperament or taste of every practitioner, even should his judgment approve it; but that does not exonerate him from knowing when to recommend it.

Even were there no therapy to offer, at least Freud's psychology has elucidated the etiology of the psycho-neuroses in an extraordinary degree. The educationalist and school doctor are now in close contact, and with a trained and sharpened insight they will find a fruitful field for their mutual energies. A reasonable sex-education may be evolved, which may prevent or undo some of the infantile fixations and phantasies that can have such pathological bearing in later life. Clearer comprehension, franker speech, and a resulting diminution of self-consciousness, may establish an interchange of problems and experiences between the different generations. The imaginary terrors and penalties of sex-abuse may be exchanged for a genuine knowledge of the actual penalties and sufferings incurred by the individual and by the race.

Again, this psychology reveals how thin a partition separates the saint from the sinner, the sane from the sick, and urges us all to work together for the common good. Jung points out that ' he who remains healthy has to struggle with the same problems that cause the neurotic to fail,' and that the psychological trouble in the neurotic, and the neurosis itself, is an act of adaptation that has failed.†

The launching of new truths must inevitably cause dis turbance in the still waters of orthodoxy, and this disturbance is caused by resistances in the masses similar to those which are constantly revealed in individuals.

* It must be understood that Freud's ' sexuality ' does not merely mean lust and its somatic expression. There is in many persons, women especially, a great repugnance, not only to the theories, but also to the facts of sex. Such persons are sometimes intentionally deaf and blind to sexual questions, and when their existence is forced upon them by the senses, their recognition may lead to anti-sexual feelings, amounting almost to an obsession and may determine a neurosis. This morbid attitude is not confined by any means to the unmarried. Every physician meets with cases where marriage is unhappy owing to this ignorance or misunderstanding of normal processes. Deficient realization of the part sexuality plays in human affairs tends as much as its exaggeration to social and moral sins and errors. That Society is suffering from ' failure of adaptation ' is painfully evident to-day. The popularity of sexual novels shows how these ideas are seeking expression; but the truth should come not through the reading of fiction, but through authoritative instruction as to the realities of life. This instruction is pre-eminently the province of the medical profession, and should be backed up by the clergyman and schoolmaster.

Some results of morbid sexuality are seen in the increase of nervous diseases, which seems to be the special burden of our century; and also in the alarming prevalence of venereal disease. We are just awaking to the devastating effects of syphilis, parasyphilis, and gonorrhoea upon racial efficiency and fecundity, and we are about to appoint a Royal Commission to investigate this question. At the same time, in the psychological field of inquiry we are beginning to ask frankly what sexuality means. It is surely appropriate that these researches should proceed pari passu. Out of the experience and knowledge gained a new education will spring. Those who will not accept the teachings of morality for its own sake will be bound to accept them in their racial bearings; for as our vision clears we shall see that science and morality spring from one common foundation.

† Transactions of the Psychiatry Section, Seventeenth International Medical Congress, London, 1913.