Before outlining our developmental conception of the _homo politicus_, we return to the work of Freud, for his method has enabled him to keep close to the subjective sequence and to use classificatory terms in relation to the successive phases of impulse organization in the developing personality. CHAPTER V THEORIES OF PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT It will be remembered that Freud’s search for signs of the traumatic situation led him to uncover the contemporaneous functioning of all sorts of unconscious motivations in both the diseased and the healthy personality. The quest led him farther. Freud felt impelled to set up a schematic representation of the typical genetic development of the human personality. This grew out of the comparative study of very thoroughly analyzed cases and was rooted in empirical observation. Freud has always kept close to his data; and no matter how far his imagination soared, actual clinical experience was the starting-place and the landing-field for the flight. The energy of a developed personality can be treated as dispersed in three directions: in the affirmative expression of socialized impulses, in unsocialized impulses, and in the maintenance of resistance charges against unsocialized impulses. The original forms of energy expression which are available to the infant are in many ways incompatible with the demands of human intercourse. The infant must surrender many primitive forms of gratification, if he is to be loved, and to avoid discomfort and pain. He must build up a self which represents the demands of society. The surrounding adults coerce and wheedle him into taking their commands for his own laws. The conscience is the introjected environment which imposes limitations upon the antisocial impulses. As the infant and child grows, he avoids conflicts with the environment by removing the locus of the conflict within himself, and plays nurse, mother, and father to himself. He learns to control his own excretions and to chasten his own murderous rages. He achieves individuality of emphasis by accepting the socialization of his major impulses. But this incorporation of the requirements of the social order into the personality does not proceed smoothly, nor does it abolish the primitive psychological structures which have been developed and apparently discarded at each step of the way toward adulthood. Much of the energy of the personality is spent in blocking the entry of the unadjusted impulses of the self into consciousness and into overt expression. Careful scrutiny of individual behavior over a twenty-four-hour period strikingly shows the extent to which the personality is controlled by very elementary psychological structures. Moments of fatigue, moments of deprivation, moments of irresponsible reverie, all betray the presence of tendencies which are unassimilated to the world of adult reality.