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NATURE. 
[FEBRUARY 5, 1914 
from that theory of the ‘“‘sub-conscious,’’ with which 
we have been so long familiar in psychology. 
The unconscious mind is a legacy from our earliest 
years of childhood, and its mode of working differs 
very considerably from that of our mind in later life. 
A little child is dominated by its wishes and desires, 
and strives blindly and persistently to satisfy them. 
Many of these wishes are bound up with the intense 
love which it feels for its parents or its nurse. Later 
on, under the influence of education and training, it 
learns to suppress some of these wishes because they 
are in conflict with other interests and desires of 
which it is now capable, and which are more in 
harmony with ethical and conventional standards. 
It learns to face pain instead of turning away from 
it, and to abandon its wishes for the sake of higher 
aims, instead of clinging blindly to them. But the 
childish wishes have not been destroyed. They con- 
tinue to exist in the mind, although their owner is 
no longer aware of them. They form the nucleus of 
the ‘‘unconscious.’’ In later life similar conflicts 
may occur, and unacceptable wishes may be sup- 
pressed. If these happen to be analogous to the 
earlier ones, they join them, and so are themselves 
drawn into the unconscious, and continue to exist in 
the mind with undiminished intensity, although 
unable under ordinary conditions to come to conscious- 
ness. On the other hand, if they do not become 
associated with corresponding infantile wishes in the 
unconscious, they remain ordinary memories, and 
gradually fade away and lose their intensity as such 
memories do. They do not become unconscious, but 
merely sub-conscious, or, as Freud puts it, ‘ pre- 
conscious.”’ 
This distinction between the ‘‘ unconscious” and the 
‘‘preconscious”’ is fundamental in Freud’s theory. It 
is a distinction between two classes of memories. 
Those memories which, as described above, join the 
unconscious are said to be ‘‘repressed.’’ They can- 
not return to consciousness unless the repressing force 
of the mind, which Freud calls the ‘‘censor,” is 
overcome. They continue, however, to exist with un- 
diminished vigour like the infantile wishes, and with 
these latter are the cause of the mystifying experi- 
ences of life to which we have already referred. 
They often cause the slips of the pen and slips of 
speech which befall us when our attention is dis- 
tracted. In these cases the censor has been caught 
napping, as it were, and the unacceptable wish comes 
for a moment to the surface of the mind. Thus a 
lady, writing to a girl friend who had recently 
married a man to whom she herself was attached, 
ends the letter with the words, ‘‘I hope that you are 
well and unhappy.” The malevolent wish here comes 
to unintentional expression. The symptoms of so- 
called functional mental diseases, such as hysteria, 
are invariably caused by repressed tendencies from 
the unconscious. A young girl suffering from hysteria 
shows the symptom of a tightly-clenched right hand 
which she is unable to open. By the method of 
psycho-analysis, which we have still to describe, the 
physician discovers that the cause of this is a serious 
adventure which had happened to the girl in early 
youth, and which she had persistently refused to tell 
to her relatives. The determination not to tell, which 
is now quite unconscious, for the girl no longer re- 
members anything about the past event or the circum- 
stances connected with it, receives a symbolic fulfil- 
ment in the clenched hand. As soon as the physician 
brings back the memory, the hand unclenches and 
the girl is cured. 
It has been suggested, with great show of reason, 
that Hamlet was a hysteric, and that the so-called 
mystery of- Hamlet is due to the effect of unconscious 
feelings of love towards his own mother dating from 
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his earliest childhood (of which he is now completely 
unaware, and his creators—Shakespeare and his 
authorities—likewise). Hamlet cannot take vengeance 
on his uncle because he himself in earlier years had 
wished his father’s death, and*this persisting wish in 
his unconscious mind now paralyses his actions. Only 
in this way, it is thought, can—e.g. Hamlet’s soli- 
loquy in Act iv., Sc. iv., after he has at last received 
overwhelming proof of his uncle’s crime, be 
adequately explained :— 
“* Now whether it be 
Restial oblivion or some craven scruple 
Of thinking too precisely on the event,— 
A thought which, quarter d, hath but one part wisdom 
And ever three parts coward,—I do not know 
Why yet I live to say ‘ this thing’s to do,” 
Sith [ have cause, and will, and strength, and means, 
To do't.” r 
This inability to act, expressed in the lines itali- 
cised, seems to have an adequate psychological ex- 
planation in the working of the repressed tendency 
just referred to, and its concomitant ideas, which 
Freud calls the ‘‘ Oedipus complex.’ In the play of 
Sophocles, Oedipus unwittingly kills his father, 
Laius, and marries his mother, Jocasta, and this is 
a mythical representation of an inner mental tragedy 
overhanging each one of us, to which the hysteric, 
through mental weakness, succumbs. 
The pleasure and amusement derived from some 
forms of wit may be explained as due to repressed 
and forbidden wishes which attain fulfilment in spite 
of the censor by means of the technique of the joke. 
Other forms of wit, though not so obviously related 
to repressed wishes, can likewise be explained: in 
terms of Freud’s general theory. 
Finally, dreams are, in Freud’s view, invariably the — 
disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes. Harmless 
memories from the previous day, and from earlier 
periods of life, are manipulated by the dream-activity 
in such a way that they form a disguise for a re-— 
pressed wish emanating from the unconscious, 
enabling the latter to evade the censor and thus come 
to consciousness during sleep. It would appear that 
sleep renders the censor less alert than he is during ~ 
waking life, although if we passed beyond this meta- 
phorical way of putting it we should come to a more 
profound theory much too difficult to describe, even 
in outline, here. The dream as it appears to the 
dreamer is simply a patchwork of memories of 
apparent unintelligibility, but underlying them are 
rational dream-thoughts corresponding to the fulfil- 
ment of repressed wishes. Often the dream represents 
the dream-thoughts symbolically, since this is a con- 
venient way of evading the censor. ; 
The method of interpreting any dream is identical 
with the method of interpreting a hysterical symptom 
or any other manifestation of unconscious ideas. In- 
deed, it is the one method whereby Freud has con- 
vinced himself of the existence of these unconscious 
ideas. This method is psycho-analysis. The dreamer 
or patient is asked to put himself into a relaxed and 
meditative frame of mind, and, starting from different 
parts of the dream, or different facts in the history 
of his mental disease, to observe and report faithfully 
the various ideas that arise spontaneously in his mind 
in connection with them, suppressing none of them, 
however objectionable or painful they may be. Ex- 
perience shows that this method enables ideas in the 
unconscious to overcome the resistance of the censor 
and rise to consciousness. In the case of mental 
disease the bringing back of these repressed memories 
to consciousness involves the cure of the patient, 
since they can now be rationally faced and dealt with, 
and the mental energy that has been locked up in 
them, “fixated,” can be liberated and put at the 
disposal of the higher conscious self. 
