Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/306

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

glimpse of the situation as it presents itself to me of the importance of the unconscious in psychopathology. It would be impossible in a short discourse to give an adequate idea of all the work that has already been done in this field.

To sum up, I may say that the function of the unconscious in conditions of mental disturbance, is essentially a compensation of the content of the conscious mind. But because of the characteristic condition of one-sidedness of the conscious striving in all such cases, the compensating correctives are rendered useless. It is, however, inevitable that these unconscious tendencies break through into the conscious mind, but in adapting themselves to the character of the one-sided conscious aims, it is only possible for them to appear in a distorted and unacceptable form.