FREUD'S THEORIES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 359 



Now, for Freud, it is of just such cast off complexes, each with 

 its own complement of energy, that the lowest level of the unconscious 

 is made up. All the unethical acts and unsocial ways of thought of 

 the child, repugnant to us to-day, still exist in the lowest dark chamber 

 of the soul, not strong enough to break out into action, but alive. It is 

 the penalty which we pay for our civilization, that it imposes standards 

 of thought and action which are foreign to the deepest tendencies in us, 

 modes of life of the cave-man and the ages before civilization, which 

 have left their marks on the soul forever. And for all of us there has 

 been some strain in adjusting to its requirements, resulting in the 

 abandonment after a struggle of the old racial ways, and the substitu- 

 tion of newer and more ethical modes of action. But a part of our 

 personality still remains in the troglodytic stage. We may not allow 

 this part expression ; we may not even be conscious that it longer exists, 

 and yet it lives and works below the threshold, just as the remembrance 

 of the death of her mother still affected the girl, though consciously it 

 had lapsed. With the split between childhood and adolescence, the 

 chasm between the old and the new becomes stiU wider; we turn our 

 back more and more on the old ways; they lapse from consciousness 

 more and more completely. Childhood seems a little alien to all of us; 

 there has been a " transvaluation of all values^' so that the remem- 

 brance of how we thought and felt then comes to us with the mark of a 

 little strangeness upon it. It is strange just because we have cast it all 

 out, we have "put away childish things." But in the dark limbo of 

 the unconscious they still live on, unconscious though we may be that 

 such is the case. The lowest level of the unconscious is thus far 

 removed from consciousness in its modes of functioning. The concep- 

 tion that such tendencies still function, still need contiuual, though 

 not conscious repression, is the essential point here. 



But now what is the mechanism that prevents us from knowing that 

 these old tendencies are still striving upward toward conscious expres- 

 sion? Consciousness is guarded from a knowledge of their existence 

 and their activities, holds Freud, by the interposition of the upper level 

 of the unconscious. This acts like a censor, a guard at the gate, and 

 will not admit to conscious expression these outworn complexes, because 

 of the pain which they would cause us if we were compelled to take 

 account of them in our thinking. It would require too much energy 

 consciously to keep them down ; so it is the function of the upper level 

 of the unconscious to save consciousness all this trouble, and to leave 

 it free for other things. This it does, in ordinary circumstances, so 

 well that we are not even aware that any repression is going on, or, 

 indeed, that there is anything to repress. We have repressed our old 

 complexes so long and so well that the act of repression has dropped 

 below the conscious level; we are not aware of its existence. But, on 



