the extraordinary fact that associations pertaining to complexes saturated with emotion emerge with much greater difficulty into consciousness, and are much more easily forgotten.
As my experiments on this subject were never reëxamined, the conclusions were never adopted, until just lately, when Wilhelm Peters, a disciple of Kraepelin, proved in general my previous observation, namely, that painful events are very rarely correctly reproduced ("die unlustbetonten Erlebnisse werden am seltensten richtig reproduciert").
As you see, the conception rests upon a firm empirical basis. There is still another side of the question worth looking at. We might ask if the repression has its root in a conscious determination of the individual, or do the reminiscences disappear rather passively without conscious knowledge on the part of the patient? In Freud's works you will find a series of excellent proofs of the existence of a conscious tendency to repress what is painful. Every psychoanalyst will know more than a dozen cases showing clearly in their history one particular moment at least in which the patient knows more or less clearly that he will not allow himself to think of the repressed reminiscences. A patient once gave this significant answer: "Je l'ai mis de côté" (I have put it aside).
But, on the other hand, we must not forget that there are a number of cases where it is impossible for us to show, even with the most careful examination, the slightest trace of conscious repression; in these cases it seems as if the mechanism of repression were much more in the nature of a passive disappearance, or even as if the impressions were dragged beneath the surface by some force operating from below. From the first class of cases we get the impression of complete mental development, accompanied by a kind of cowardice in regard to their own feelings; but among the second class of cases you may find patients showing a more serious retardation of development. The mechanism of repression seems here to be much more an automatic one.
This difference is closely connected with the question I mentioned before—that is, the question of the relative importance of predisposition and environment. The first class of cases appears to be mainly influenced by environment and education; in
