their own persons. Neither would they be repressed in the sense of being pressed back into a continued life of protest. It might be fair to say that, as at first defined, they would be suppressed, as a necessary first stage of being sublimated.[1] All growth must involve some such suppression of imperfectly defined wishes, until we discover what, as a major purpose of our existence, we really want. Repression must be judged bad; not however because of the local rights of the minor wish, but rather because it implies a laxity of the main current of the will, a Lot's-wife sort of irresolution, such as a brisker seizure in thought of one's chosen object might dissipate.
I am not posing as a protagonist of self-mutilation or asceticism, though I believe with William James that every man needs his own quota. I thoroughly believe in the principle of the inte-
- ↑ I have been using throughout the word repression for Freud's Verdrängung. I have had this distinction in mind in doing so. For Freud, Verdrängungis not the general condition of a wish which is denied outlet, but rather the condition of the wish which while outwardly checked is inwardly harbored. He recognizes the normality of what I have called suppression as a part of growth. Thus, in his Clark lectures, he speaks as follows: "The general consequence (of psychoanalytic treatment) is, that the wish is consumed during the work by the correct mental activity of those better tendencies which are opposed to it. The repression is supplanted by a condemnation, carried through with the best means at one's disposal. ... (At the origin of the trouble) the individual for his part only repressed the useless impulse, because at that time he was himself incompletely organized and weak; in his present maturity and strength he can perhaps conquer without injury to himself that which is inimical to him." So far, Freud pictures the rather drastic procedure in which wish B actually puts wish A out of existence entirely, suppressing it, instead of repressing it; and without substitution. But, he continues, "the extirpation of the infantile wishes is not at all the ideal aim of development. The neurotic has lost by his repressions many sources of mental energy whose contingents would have been very valuable for his character-building and life activities. We know a far more purposive process of development, the so-called sublimation, by which the energy of infantile wish-excitations is not secluded, but remains capable of application, while for the particular excitations, instead of becoming useless, a higher, eventually no longer sexual goal, is set up." It is this departure from the 'sexual goal' which evidences that Freud does not contemplate the satisfaction of wish A in its nominal character. To be sublimated, it must, in this character, be suppressed. Freud goes on, however, to indicate that he does not regard sublimation as an ideal solution of the problem of wishes. It is far more desirable, he suggests in a figure, that from the point of view of mental energy A and B should be satisfied in their particular characters. So far, he subscribes to Professor Holt's method, but he does not identify it with morality. (American Journal of Psychology, Vol. XXI, 1910, p. 217).
