Thus the mind of the adult, according to Freud, in addition to activities which are conscious and fully accessible to the subject, carries on activities and holds memories which are unconscious and totally inaccessible to the subject by any ordinary method of introspection. Between these two fields there is a barrier sedulously guarded by certain repressive forces. The unconscious is the realm of all the experiences, memories, impulses, and inclinations which during the subject’s life have been condemned by the standards of the conscious, have proved incompatible with it and have therefore been outlawed from it. This banishment in no way deprives these excluded mental processes of their energy, and they constantly influence the feelings and behaviour of the subject. So strict, however, is the guard between them and the conscious that they are never allowed to pass the barrier between one sphere and the other except in disguised and fantastically distorted forms by which their true meaning is closely concealed. It has been perhaps Freud’s most remarkable thesis that dreams are manifestations of this emergence of desires and memories from the unconscious into the conscious field. During sleep the repressing force which guards the frontier between conscious and unconscious is weakened. Even then, however, such ideas as emerge into the conscious can do so only in a worked up and distorted form, so that their significance can be disengaged from the grotesque jumble of the actual dream only by a minute inquiry according to a difficult and highly technical method. { 75} By this method, however, is to be obtained a deep insight into the otherwise irrecoverable emotional history of the individual, the structure of his temperament, and, if he is mentally abnormal, the meaning of his symptoms.
The foregoing enumeration of the chief doctrines of the Freudian psychology is intended to be no more than a mere outline to serve as a basis for certain comments which seem to be relevant to the general argument of this essay. The point of view from which this slight sketch is made, that of an interested but detached observer, is naturally somewhat different from that of the actual authorities themselves. Here it is desired to get the broadest possible view in the most general terms, and as we have no concern with immediate problems of practical therapeutics—which remain at least the chief preoccupation of writers of the psycho-analytic school—an effort has been made to avoid the use of the rich and rather forbidding technical vocabulary in which the writings of the school abound. It may well be that this generalized method of description has yielded an ill-proportioned or distorted picture. The subject has proved to be so much at the mercy of prejudice that the least impassioned spectator, however completely he may believe himself to be free from advocacy or detraction, is far from being able to claim immunity from these influences.