442 MICHAEL E. STOCK 



compulsive, obsessional neurosis. The conclusion is now fairly 

 widely accepted that scruples are nothing more than a par- 

 ticular form of this neurosis, and can and should be treated 

 accordingly. Since scruples had previously been considered a 

 form of conscience defect often almost wholly unamenable to 

 correction, the usages of psychoanalysis can be credited with 

 opening up what was a practical impasse.*^ 



It would seem, moreover, that there is much room for further 

 profitable study in this area. The timidity of the timorous 

 conscience, the harshness of the rigid conscience, the stub- 

 borness of some erroneous consciences, are characteristics on 

 which psychoanalysis has been able to throw much incidental 

 light. Some of these qualities — any one of which is at least 

 unfortunate for the individual and for his associates — can be 

 understood only in the light of basic instinctual or affective 

 demands, or as reactions to such demands. Moreover, although 

 they ordinarily resist even the most vigorous deliberate and 

 direct attempts to eradicate them, even with all the good will 

 in the world, sometimes they respond with surprising ease to 

 the kind of indirect insight which depth psychology is prepared 

 to offer,*^ In most of these cases, simple instruction is not 

 enough to change efficaciously the basic attitudes from which 

 these qualities flow. There must first be a deeper reorganiza- 

 tion, a reversal of some more or less unconsciously adopted 



*^ See: " Scrupulosity," Rev. John R. McCall, S. J.; " Scrupulosity from the 

 psychoanalytic viewpoint," Vincent P. Mahoney, M. D.; " The Problem of scrupu- 

 losity," Joseph D. Sullivan, M. D. in The Bulletin of the Quild of Catholic Psy- 

 chiatrists, December, 1957. Also: "La theologie du scruple," L. B. Geiger, O. P., 

 and " La pastorale, et les scruples," N. Mailloux. O. P., La Vie Spirituelle, Supple- 

 ment, n. 39, 1956, 400-439. 



*^ " Bodily attitudes such as stiffness and rigidity, personal peculiarities such as a 

 fixed smile, contemptuous, ironical and arrogant behavior — all these are residues of 

 very vigorous defensive processes in the past, which have become dissociated from 

 their original situations (conflicts with instincts or affects) and have developed into 

 permanent character-traits, the ' armour-plating of character.' . . . When in analysis 

 we succeed in tracing these residues to their historical source, they recover their 

 mobility and cease to block by their fixation our access to the defensive operations 

 upon which the ego is at the moment actively engaged." Anna Freud, The Ego and 

 Mechanisms of Defence, p. 35. 



