160 Some Implications of the Incarnation [CH. 



ated by a stimulus that has been often repeated 1 . All 

 this harmonises very well, up to a point, with the 

 Freudian view of repressions 2 . According to this latter 

 school, impulses which, for social or religious reasons, 

 cannot be satisfied in obviously appropriate action are 

 either repressed from consciousness in which case they 

 may, if potent enough, break out and be discharged 

 in some symbolic way; and then in extreme cases, 

 the man may become abnormal, or even insane or 

 else their character is recognised in consciousness and 

 they are bravely faced, instead of being relegated to 

 Mrs Grundy's Chamber of Impossible? when they 

 achieve discharge along a higher path, harmlessly. 

 In many cases these repressed desires are related to 

 habits, and serve as the trigger through whose operation 

 the path of habit is traversed by some impulse. Their 

 symbolic or sublimated discharge acts in the normal in- 

 dividual as a safety-valve, and so fulfils the utilitarian 

 function postulated by Bergson for all memories. Thus, 

 though repressed by the censor, and so never entering 

 into waking consciousness, they appear and function 

 in dreams, and also, without appearing, become causal 

 factors in the neuroses. 



But, as Cunningham 8 points out, all the past, and so 

 all memory, is really directed towards the future. So 

 also even the repressed ideas. It is an essential point in 



1 It is possible to define memory simply as potential ideas. I do 

 not think that such a definition clashes with Bergson's conception. 

 According to him the past does exist, and by memory is selected 

 from in so far as it becomes useful. According to the foregoing 

 definition the potential ideas would become actual when an end 

 could be subserved by their doing so. To the practical psycholo- 

 gist the new definition may appear the more useful ; to the meta- 

 physician perhaps the other. 



See however Appendix A. 



An Introduction to the Study of the Philosophy of Bergson. 



