CONCEPTIONS AND MISCONCEPTIONS 219 



repression of the individual's sexuality due to the ban set 

 on the manifestations of this elemental instinct by the 

 strictures of social and religious conventions. It is the 

 conflict between the forces of artificial culture and those 

 of an inherent instinct of sex, the former imposing the 

 repudiation of sexuality, the latter insisting as resolutely 

 on a due recognition of the basal significance of this ele- 

 mental factor in the biologic economy. The sexual instinct 

 stoutly insists that it be granted recognition in conscious- 

 ness, and consciousness, in its narrow intolerance, is as 

 fiercely resolved to debar so unseemly an intruder. The 

 final upshot of the situation is a compromise. It is agreed 

 that the unruly element be admitted to consciousness on 

 condition that it soften its tone and, as it were, adopt con- 

 ventional apparel conformable to the requirements of 

 adult, social consciousness. It is to this end that the 

 psychic organism assumes the social defense it finds in 

 the elaborate metaphorical usages presented in the pa- 

 tient's "symptoms." For it is only through dissembling 

 that the repressed complex can succeed in evading the 

 anathema of the conscious censor. But, though disguised 

 in consciousness, this discordant, outlawed element still 

 lurks in the unconscious, where, acting surreptitiously, it 

 incites dissension amid the constituents of the personality, 

 impairing its unity and destroying the mental synthesis 

 requisite to the purposes of concerted function. 



It is Freud's thesis, then, that the neurosis entails a 

 psychic conflict due to an attempt to exclude from a fit 

 acknowledgment, in consciousness, the biologic factors 

 whose prerogatives are fundamental and inalienable. As 

 has been said, such an exclusion of normal interests from 

 participation in current consciousness Freud calls a re- 

 pression. A psychic repression being the essential mech- 

 anism of a neurosis, the question for psychotherapeutics 

 is, How may disorders arising from a psychic conflict, 

 issuing out of the arbitrary and extraneous repression 

 from consciousness of such contraband associations, be 



