Psycho-analytic psychology has grown up under conditions which may very well have encouraged the persistence of the human point of view. Originally its whole activity was concentrated upon the investigation and treatment of disease. Many of its early disciples were those who had received proof of its value in their own persons, those, that is to say, who had been sufferers from their very susceptibility to the influence of human standards. The objective standard of validity by which the system was judged was necessarily that of the physician, namely the capacity to restore the abnormal mind to the “normal.” Normal in this sense is of course no more than a statistical expression implying the condition of the average man. It could scarcely fail, however, to acquire the significance of “healthy.” If once the statistically { 79} normal mind is accepted as being synonymous with the psychologically healthy mind (that is, the mind in which the full capacities are available for use), a standard is set up which has a most fallacious appearance of objectivity. The statistically normal mind can be regarded only as a mind which has responded in the usual way to the moulding and deforming influence of its environment—that is, to human standards of discipline, taste, and morality. If it is to be looked upon as typically healthy also, the current human standards of whose influence it is a product must necessarily be accepted as qualified to call forth the best in the developing mind they mould. Writers of the psycho-analytic school seem in general to make some such assumption as this.
The conception of mental conflict is the central feature of the Freudian system. Of its importance and validity there can be no doubt. In a general way the idea is familiar and even commonplace, but Freud had developed it and shown how deeply the principle penetrates the structure and development of the mind from the earliest period and to an extent quite unsuspected by earlier psychologists.
From an early period of life the child finds the gratification of its instinctive impulses checked or even prevented by the pressure of its environment. Conflict is thus set up between the two forces of instinctive pressure within and social pressure from without. Instinctive impulses which thus come into conflict with the repressing force are not destroyed but are deflected from their natural outlet, are repressed within the mind and ultimately prevented from rising into the conscious field at all except in disguised or symbolic forms. To the adult his childhood seems to have been altogether free from { 80} any kind of sexual activity or interest, not because, as is generally supposed, such has never existed, but because it proved incapable of persisting in the conscious field and was suppressed into the unconscious with the increase of the social repressing forces. Similarly impulses experienced in adult life which are for the same reason incompatible with conscious recognition do not become conscious, but live their life in the unconscious, though they may exercise the profoundest influence on the happiness and health of the subject.