Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/251

 and educated chronic patients who after many years of practice have learned to control their outward behavior and therefore outwardly display very little if anything of their neuroses. On superficial observation they can be taken as normal, yet in some places they show disturbances which betray the repressed complex.

After examining the reaction times I turn my attention to the type of the association to ascertain with what type I am dealing. If it is a predicate type I draw the conclusions which I have detailed above; if it is a complex type I try to ascertain the nature of the complex. With the necessary experience one can readily emancipate himself from the test person’s statements and almost without any previous knowledge of the test persons it is possible under certain circumstances to read the most intimate complexes from the results of the experiment. I at first look for the reproduction words and put them together, and I then look for the stimulus words which show the greatest disturbances. In many cases a mere assortment of these words suffices to show the complex. In some cases it is necessary to put a question here and there. It will be best to illustrate this with a concrete example:

It concerns an educated woman of 30 years who has been married for three years. After her marriage she suffers from episodic excitements in which she is violently jealous of her husband. The marriage is a happy one in every other respect and it should be noted that the husband gives no cause for the jealousy. The patient is sure that she loves him and that her excited states are groundless. She cannot imagine whence these excited states originate, and feels quite perplexed over them. It is to be noted that the patient is a catholic and has been brought up religiously, while her husband is a protestant. This difference of religion did not admittedly play any part. A more thorough anamnesis showed the existence of an extreme prudishness. Thus, for example, no one was allowed to talk in the patient’s presence about her sister’s childbirth, because the sexual moment suggested therein caused her the greatest excitement. She always undressed in the adjoining room and never in her husband’s presence, etc. At the age of 27 she was supposed to have had no idea how children were born. The associations gave the results shown in the accompanying chart.

The blue columns represent failures of reproductions, the green ones represent repetitions of stimulus words, and the yellow columns show those associations in which the patient either laughed or made mistakes, using many instead of one word. The height of the columns represent the length of the reaction time.