Instead of demonstrating repression in the laboratory through the selective recall of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli, the authors hit upon a somewhat different method with pitfalls of its own. They devised a pair of short stories in the form of dreams, one relating a wish to cohabit with the mother expressed mostly in classical dream symbolism and the other presumably neutral (though actually lending itself to superficial interpretation as an erotic fantasy about a sibling). In testing recall of the experimental and control stories in experimental and control groups (twenty-five undergraduate sociology students in each group) the authors found that the men in the experimental group tended to recall fewer units of the story and to make more distortions than did the men in the control group with their story. They interpret this forgetting as 'repression' linked to the Oedipus complex. The construction of the stories used and the method of the experiment leave much to be desired, yet the idea of studying repression in this way is an interesting one.