216 CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE 



pression of the tendency toward the fulfilment of sucK 

 unconscious wishes. Thus he ascribes to the neurosis a 

 purposive significance a moral import. The neurosis 

 contains a motive. It embodies an underlying intention: 

 tends to supply a void not clearly cognized and defined, 

 because existing outside the precincts of consciousness. 



Thirdly, the ideas or wishes which thus occupy the 

 sphere of unconsciousness possess the generic character 

 of being invariably such as are ethically inadmissible in 

 the sight of consciousness, so that the psychologic account 

 of the creation of this limbo of the unconscious is to be 

 found in the psychic conflict arising out of the opposition 

 of consciousness to these ethically unwelcome desires and 

 their consequent enforced banishment from consciousness 

 a process which Freud calls the mechanism of repres- 

 sion (Verdrdngung) . 3 Hence, in accordance with the 

 hypothesis, a psychic conflict, with the attendant re- 

 pression of the unseemly element, is the basic factor in 

 the production of the neuroses. 



Fourthly, it is Freud's thesis that all such conflicts as 

 issue in such unconscious repression have their ultimate 

 basis in the sphere of the sexual instinct. In other words, 

 psychoanalysis posits a sexual repression as the essential 

 condition in the etiology of a neurosis. 4 



And lastly, the theory assumes that such symptoms as 

 are the expression of a tendency toward the fulfilment of 

 these forbidden trends are but an indirect, cunningly 

 veiled representation of them ; that they are substitutions 

 employed by reason of their associative affiliation with the 

 original underlying idea. Each symptom is the dramatic 



3 Brewer and Freud : Studien iiber Hysterie, Vienna, Deuticke, 

 1910. 



4 It should be explained, however, that the word "sexual," as 

 Freud uses it, has a far more general and inclusive meaning than 

 is conveyed by the term as commonly employed. Contrary to 

 the specific connotation of conventional usage, the term denotes, 

 with Freud, the entire sphere of the primary, biologic pleasure- 

 affects. 



