the personality of the subject. Thus only can the mind become, in the worn but still infinitely appropriate metaphor, a house divided against itself. The counter-impulses to the developing sexual interest and activity of the child are, as we have seen, the result of social pressure—that is to say, the result of the influence of the human environment. This influence is manifested, not merely in direct precept, in warning, in punishment, in expressions of disapproval or disgust, but in the whole system of secrecy, of significant silences, of suppressions, of nods and winks and surreptitious signallings, of sudden causeless snubs and patently lame explanations amid which such sexual interest as the child possesses has to find a modus vivendi and an intelligible meaning.
Whence does this environmental pressure obtain the power which enables it to exercise in the child’s mind the regal functions of instinct? Clearly it can do so only if the mind possesses a specific sensitiveness to external opinion and the capacity to confer on its precepts the sanction of instinctive force. In the two earlier