other people. Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the
people who surrounded us when we were children; and now when we meet a
new person we are likely unconsciously to say to ourselves--not, "This
person has eyebrows like my mother, or a voice like my nurse," or,
"This person bosses me around as my father used to do," but, "This is
my mother, this is my nurse, this is my father." Whereupon we may
proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the
original person in childhood.

Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and
behaving toward the one as if he were that other. Analysis has
discovered that many a man's hostile attitude toward the state or
religion or authority in general, is nothing more than this kind of
displacement of his childhood's attitude toward authority in the
person of his perhaps too-domineering father. Many a woman has married
a husband, not for what he was in himself, but because she
unconsciously identified him with her childish image of her father.

Students of human nature have always recognized the kind of
displacement which transfers the sense of guilt from some major act or
attitude to a minor one which is more easily faced, just as _Lady
Macbeth_ felt that by washing her hands she might free herself from
her deeper stain. This is a frequent mechanism in the
psychoneuroses--not that neurotics are likely to have committed any
great crime, but that they feel subconsciously that some of their
wishes or thoughts are wicked.

=The Phenomena of Dissociation.= When an idea or a complex, a
perception or a memory is either temporarily or permanently shoved out
of consciousness into the subconscious, it is said to be dissociated.