Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/305

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only partially succeeds, for it causes him to become jealous of his wife as if he still loved her. As we know, he may even go so far as to kill both his wife and himself, merely out of jealousy. In other words, his love for his wife has not been entirely lost, it has simply become subliminal; but from the realm of the unconscious it can now only reappear in the form of jealousy.

We see something of a similar nature in the case of religious converts. One who turns from protestantism to Catholicism has, as is well known, the tendency to be somewhat fanatical. His protestantism is not entirely relinquished, but has merely disappeared into the unconscious, where it is constantly at work as a counter-argument against the newly acquired Catholicism. Therefore the new convert feels himself constrained to defend the faith he has adopted in a more or less fanatical way. It is exactly the same in the case of the paranoiac, who feels himself constantly constrained to defend himself against all external criticism, because his delusional system is too much threatened from within.

The strange manner in which these compensating influences break through into the conscious mind, derives its peculiarities from the fact that they have to struggle against the resistances already existing in the conscious mind, and therefore present themselves to the patient’s mind in a thoroughly distorted manner. And secondly, these compensating equivalents are obliged necessarily to present themselves in the language of the unconscious—that is, in material of a heterogeneous and subliminal nature. For all the material of the conscious mind which is of no further value, and can find no suitable employment, becomes subliminal, such as all those forgotten infantile and phantastic creations that have ever entered the heads of men, of which only the legends and myths still remain. For certain reasons which I cannot discuss further here, this latter material is frequently found in dementia praecox.

I hope I may have been able to give in this brief contribution, which I feel to be unfortunately incomplete, a