3. But, the theory continues, the conscious personality is the
socialized personality, having aims and ends not consistent with
desire for mother, homosexual cravings, lust for a married man or
woman. So there ensues a battle between desire and inhibition.
The inhibiting agent is a something called the censor, who pushes
back into the subconsciousness the socially tabooed, the socially
abhorrent desires; represses emotions and instincts that are
socially out of order. But there is no real victory for the
consciousness, for the complex (the name given to a desire or
wish with its attendant ideas, emotions and motor manifestations)
is still active, subconsciously changing the life of the person,
causing him to make slips in his speech, expressing itself in his
dreams and his work, and if sufficiently powerful, giving rise to
nervous or mental disease of one type or another. Nothing is ever
forgotten, according to Freud, and the reason our childhood is
not voluntarily remembered is because it is full of forbidden
desires and curiosities and the developing censor thrusts it all
into the subconsciousness, where it continues to make trouble all
the rest of the individual's life. In fact, a cardinal part of
Freudianism (which he and his followers are lately modifying) is
that it is the results of the "psychic traumata" (psychical
injuries) of infancy and childhood that cause the hysteria of the
adult; and these psychical traumata are largely (about ninety-
nine per cent.) sexual.
4. Freudianism has borrowed the time-honored dictum that every
sensation has a natural result in action and has elaborated it
into the statement that every affective state, every desire and
craving of whatever sort, needs a motor discharge, an avenue of
outlet. If the desire or emotion is inhibited, its excitement is
transferred with it into the subconscious and that excitement may
attach itself to other excitements and break into consciousness
as a mental disturbance of one type or another. If you can get at
the complex by psychoanalysis, by dragging it to the light, by
making it conscious, you discharge the excitement and health is
restored. This originally was very important in the Freudian work
and was called by the crude term of catharsis.
5. How can one get at these subterranean cravings and strivings,
at the fact that originally one desired one's mother and was
jealous of one's father, or vice versa? Here Freud developed an
elaborate technique based on the following:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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