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If neuroses were to be treated by bringing thoughts out from the unconscious,then a way had to be found to reach into the unconscious.
Freud found one approach to reaching the unconscious that became an important part of psychoanalysis,an approach he called free association.
Patients were asked to let their thoughts wander and say whatever came into their minds.
He wanted to hear all memories,dreams,and wishes of his patients.
As they spoke,he found they remembered painful memories from the unconscious-memories that they had long kept hidden.

All of us have memories that we keep hidden in our unconscious.
Here is a simple experiment that will give you some idea of how deeply memories are buried.
Write a list of ten words,including words such as mother,school,church,and kissing.
Ask a friend to tell you the first word that comes into his mind after you read each word.

You will find that some answers take much longer to tell than others.
Freud believed that the answers people could not give quickly were in some way connected with painful or unpleasant memories.
You will not learn too much about a person by using free association.
In the hands of a trained person,however,it becomes a valuable tool.

Have you ever forgotten a telephone number that you knew perfectly well?
Have you ever met a friend on the street and called him by the wrong name?

Freud explained these errors as struggles between the conscious and unconscious.
You had a reason, he would have said,for not remembering the telephone number that you consciously tried to remember.
The reason might be that you do not like the person you were going to call or you might have had a recent unpleasant telephone call.

Sometimes it is very easy to see the unconscious thought.
For example,a young girl asked her mother,"Did you have parties like this when you were alive?"
Imagine what the girl thought of her mother!

Just as man has always made errors,he has always dreamed.
But Freud,in 1900,was the first to make a careful study of dreams.
This gave us still another look into the unconscious mind.

Dreams are a form of mental activity that goes on when a person is asleep.
Some dreams may be unreal and seem to make little sense,and others may be so real and clear that we are not sure that we are dreaming.
Dreams are a stage on which the unconscious can act out its needs,fears,desires,and hopes while the conscious mind sleeps.

Mary,a young lady,had this dream:She was driving the old family car,with her father as a passenger.
She came to a high hill.
It was too high for her.
She asked her father to drive up he hill.

One way to understand Mary's dream is as a wish to be adult and independent.
The hill is a problem she cannot answer for herself.
She needs to be a child again and ask her father for help.
She wants to be independent at the same time that she wants to depend on her parents.

After studying hundreds of dreams,Freud found that dreams have a language of their own.
The language of dreams deals with symbols,where one thing really means something else.
In Mary's dream,the hill was not really a hill,but a big problem.
Driving a car was a symbol for being adult and free.
These symbols sometimes have meaning for just one person.
But Freud found that the same symbols appear again and again in the dreams of different people ,at different times and in different places.

House is one such symbol that appears in the dreams of many people.
He found that house is often the symbol for the body.
Other symbols,he found,were kings and queens for one's parents;water for birth;and a long trip for death.
Sometimes symbols mean something quite different from what you might expect.
Dreams of being in a crowd,for example,often mean that you feel alone;dreams of clothing or a uniform often mean that you feel naked.

These symbols can be a valuable tool in understanding dreams.
To understand the human mind,a doctor does not simply connect dream symbols with their meanings in a book.
To the trained doctor, dream symbols are another tool of science to help people understand and accept themselves.

The conscious and unconscious parts of our mind form what we are,how we think,how we act,what we want,what we fear,our personality.
Freud found that one's personality works in three ways.
He called these three:id,the ego,and the superego.
They are different ways that the mind,or personality,works.
They are not different parts of the brain.

Here,in simple terms,is how the personality is put together.
The id is the selfish child of the unconscious.
It is not interested in anyone or anything expect gathering pleasure when it wants it.
Good and bad,right and wrong ,mean nothing to the id;whatever it takes.
The id,or"I want,"is the difference between real food and imaginary food.

It is the job of the ego to tell the difference between real and imaginary,and to help the id find it with the least trouble.
The ego is the connection between the needs of the id and the real world which can satisfy these needs.
The ego has to take care of the entire person,not just satisfy the id.
Sometimes the ego gives the id what it wants.
Sometimes the ego makes the id wait to get what it wants.