deflected from their natural outlet, are repressed within the mind and ultimately prevented from rising into the conscious field at all except in disguised or symbolic forms. To the adult his childhood seems to have been altogether free from {80} any kind of sexual activity or interest, not because, as is generally supposed, such has never existed, but because it proved incapable of persisting in the conscious field and was suppressed into the unconscious with the increase of the social repressing forces. Similarly impulses experienced in adult life which are for the same reason incompatible with conscious recognition do not become conscious, but live their life in the unconscious, though they may exercise the profoundest influence on the happiness and health of the subject.
The work of Freud has been concentrated chiefly upon the one party in these conflicts—the instinctive impulse of which the only considerable one according to him is the sexual. To the other party—the repressing forces—he has given very much less attention, and in them has found apparently much less interest. By most writers of