We said once that the memories of the childhood relations with Zoë are
in a state of “repression” with Norbert Hanold; and we have called them
“unconscious memories.” Here we must, of course, turn our attention to
the relation between the two technical terms which seem to coincide in
meaning. It is not hard to clear this up. “Unconscious” is the broader
term, “repressed” the narrower. Everything that is repressed is
unconscious; but we cannot assert that everything unconscious is
repressed. If Hanold, at the sight of the relief, had remembered his
Zoë’s manner of walking, then a formerly unconscious memory would have
become immediately active and conscious, and thus would have shown that
it was not formerly repressed. “Unconscious” is a purely descriptive
term, in many respects indefinite and, so to speak, static; “repressed”
is a dynamic expression which takes into consideration the play of
psychic forces and the fact that there is present an effort to express
all psychic activities, among them that of becoming conscious again, but
also a counterforce, a resistance, which might hinder a part of these
psychic activities, among these, also, getting into consciousness. The
mark of the repressed material is that, in spite of its intensity, it
cannot break through into consciousness. In Hanold’s case, therefore, it
was a matter, at the appearance of the bas-relief on his horizon, of a
repressed unconscious, in short of a repression.
The memories of his childhood association with the girl who walks
beautifully are repressed in Norbert Hanold, but this is not yet the
correct view of the psychological situation. We remain on the surface so
long as we treat only of memories and ideas. The only valuable things in
psychic life are, rather, the emotions. All psychic powers are
significant only through their fitness to awaken emotions. Ideas are
repressed only because they are connected with liberations of emotions,
which are not to come to light; it would be more correct to say that
repression deals with the emotions, but these are comprehensible to us
only in connection with ideas. Thus, in Norbert Hanold, the erotic
feelings are repressed, and, as his eroticism neither knows nor has
known another object than Zoë Bertgang of his youth, the memories of her
are forgotten. The antique bas-relief awakens the slumbering eroticism
in him and makes the childhood memories active. On account of a
resistance in him to the eroticism, these memories can become active
only as unconscious. What now happens in him is a struggle between the
power of eroticism and the forces that are repressing it; the result of
this struggle is a delusion.
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