Introduction - This is a book for normal people! Normal people,with problems.

It is written for the person who, although afflicted with some degree of unconscious conflicts (as we all are to some extent), is sufficiently well balanced to follow the instructions at self analysis which are explained in detail.

1. Why Psychoanalyze - I want you to psychoanalyze yourself. Yes, you may very well be able to help yourself with the aid of the analytic method. It's not some deep dark secret system dreamed up only a few years ago by bearded intellects.

The first psychoanalyst lived a long, long time ago; somewhere about 2200 years or so. Just who this old-time mental specialist was, where he lived, and how long he practiced, is not on record.

2. Mental Health - I want you to rate your own mental health.

Classifying your own mental condition is an al­most impossible task, according to experts. But, it is a little easier if you go about it from the positive point of view—mental health rather than mental illness.

3. Your Unconscious - I want you to try to return to your cradle. Do you remember the time when you lay in the cradle kicking up your toes—and possibly kicking up a row at the same time?

Do you remember the time when you were taking your first lesson in walking, and the floor seemed to wobble a good deal, and you tried to steady things by balancing yourself a little heavily on one leg and then on the other, and finally finished up by making a slight dent in the linoleum with the point of your poor little nose?

4. Unconscious Speaks - I want you to imagine you are in a strange country. How would you get along if you did not know one word of the language, and if no one else knew a word of your own?

Under such circumstances, how do you think that you would manage to explain to the natives the ideas which you had in your mind, or be able to under­stand the ideas that they had in theirs? To some ex­tent you could make yourself understood by making signs, and could interpret some of the signs of the natives.

5. Free Association - I want to teach you how to fish. I not only want to teach you how to fish, but to show you where the fishing is good.

I do not want you to fish for physical fish, however; nor for compliments. I want you to fish for ideas— your own ideas.

The ideas are your own in that you are supposed to hold a form of equity interest in them. But having an equity in something or other and being in actual possession and enjoyment of it are two altogether different considerations.

6. Unconscious Experiment - I want you to write a little original story of about fifty words.

You will note the three words that I have italicized. I italicized the word "original" so that you will appre­hend the full significance of the requirement; and I similarly treated the last two words so that you will not be justifiably frightened at the task suggested.

7. “Nervous Breakdown” - I want you to think of the people you have known who suffered mental breakdowns.

When we see a person with an alert, forceful, and orderly mind going through the business requirements of the day as if work were a pleasure (which it is), and see another person suffering from a "nervous breakdown" being wheeled along in an invalid's chair, all "shot to pieces," it is hard to realize that the in­valid-chair specimen possesses quite as much energy as has the energetic individual who is making things move in the affairs of life. Yet such is the case.

8. Helps You Concentrate - I want you to go to India for a few minutes. See that old man sitting down in that mass of filth looking at the tip of the second finger of his left hand? He doesn't move much; in fact, about one movement a week is what he allows himself.

No. I don't know how long that old image has been sitting there among the filth and flies: maybe two or three years; perhaps more, perhaps less.

9. Smoking Habit - I want you to "psychoanalyze away" one of your bad habits!

It can be done—smoking, or even more deeprooted habits—can be discarded by you yourself.

Let me tell you how I stopped smoking.

I was a smoker for thirty years—a heavy smoker.

10. Better Future - I want you to forget will power. Some people throw away their money in one way and some in another; and very often it all amounts to about the same thing in the end. Some like to joy ride, while others prefer to gamble in wildcat shares. But if anyone really wants to qualify as a first-class idiot in money-wasting, no better opportunity exists than to buy and read all the stupid books that have been written about will power.

1. Build Self - I want you to weed your own mind. If seventeen people happen to own gardens, and have strong desires to keep their respective plots nicely cultivated and free from weeds, the probabili­ties are that those seventeen people will organize their individual working schedules according to seventeen sets of respective ideas.

2. Your Dreams - I want you to dream a dream. I want you to dream a plain, ordinary dream, and to dream it in the plain, ordinary way. If this dream is seemingly funny and senseless, so much the better (though these will be features that are beyond your control).

Perhaps, just because you are required to have this dream for subsequent experimental purposes, you will not be able to have it just when it is wanted; sooner or later, however, you will probably dream—just as you have done so many times before in your life.

3. Analyze Dreams - Dreams that are to be analyzed should be writ­ten down as soon as they occur. They should be scribbled hastily, so that all fleeting elements can be anchored to the consciousness.

Split the dream up into its elemental parts and try to analyze it sometime during the day immediately following the night of the dream.

4. Cover-Memories - I want you to do a little grubbing for mind worms.

Like everyone else, probably, you have memories of little incidents which stand out clearly in your mind every time that you allow your thoughts to travel back to your days of childhood. Have you ever won­dered why some little, apparently trivial incident should stand out so prominently and persistently in your juvenile memories?

5. Analyze Cover-Memories - Write all these out in detail. Treat each one as if it were a psychical story—which it is. But do not elaborate.

Split each such psychical story into its elemental parts and use each element as a stimulus idea for developing flows of free associations.

Analyze precisely as you do with dreams.

6. Complexes - I want you to get rid of the dead hands in your life.

In relation to the terms of charities, wills, bequests, foundations, etc., we often hear used the term dead hand. It is a term which has been coined as a protest against the interests of the living being fettered by the wishes of the dead. It indicates a more or less justifiable sentiment that after a person has lived his own life as he has largely wanted to do, he has no logical right to impose restrictions on posterity.

7. Analyze Fixations - Make two inventories of your mental and tem­peramental characteristics.

In one of these write every phase of mental and temperamental characteristics in your personality which is commendable. Don't imagine anything nor wish for anything. Simply write down a list of every form and tendency of mental attitude and tempera­mental disposition of a desirable nature which you know that you possess.

8. Exaggerated Reactions - I want you to go hunting for trouble. Some people manage to get into most serious trouble in looking for trouble; so much so, in fact, that after the trouble is over they have only the haziest idea of what the trouble has been about.

That's the sort of trouble to keep away from.

9. Analyze Reactions - Analyze all of your exaggerated reactions and disturbances.

The best time to do this is as soon as possible after the occurrence; in practice, however, a mental in­ventory taken at the close of the day, accompanied by self-analysis, will be found more convenient.

10. Word-Dreams - I want you to talk to yourself. Go somewhere where you can be alone, and where you can talk to yourself without being over­heard. Then think of all the weaknesses and undesir­able characteristics that: have troubled you so greatly in your life, and utter them aloud.

Bring out every shortcoming and furtive tendency and permit your own ears to hear your own voice giving expression to those repressed thoughts.

11. Analyze Word-Dreams - No purgatives are natural in their operation; nev­ertheless a recourse to their aid is occasionally necessary.

Go to some place where you can have real solitude. Then submit yourself to the mental purgation treat­ment set forth in the preceding chapter.

Purge your mind; and without mercy. You will feel the better for it.

12. False Troubles - I want you to check your troubles. I believe that it was Mark Twain who said something to the effect that he had gone through many troubles in his life, a mighty lot of them, though as a matter of fact not many of them had really happened

It was a very expressive way on the part of the celebrated philosopher of saying that most of his troubles had been imaginary.

13. Analyze Troubles - Go back now to that mental inventory of yours and see how much trouble you have been carry­ing about unnecessarily in your unconscious for many years. Then shed these troubles by readjusting your mental attitude.

Refer now to the various memories, sensations, and tendencies that you acknowledged to yourself in your purging treatment.

14. How Long? - How long does one have to persist in these ana­lytic efforts before any pronounced results are to be hoped for? And how long do they have to be kept up?

It will depend wholly on what has been accom­plished. In order to produce results something has to be analytically attained; some element of a dream, an emotional experience, or a cover-memory must be made to yield up its secret to the consciousness.

THE END