How had it come about that the patients had forgotten so many of the facts of their external and internal lives, but could nevertheless recollect them if a particular technique was applied? Observation supplied an exhaustive answer to these questions. Everything that had been forgotten had in some way or other been painful; it had been either alarming or disagreeable or shameful, by the standards of the subject’s personality. The thought arose spontaneously: it was precisely on that account that it had been forgotten, i. e. that it had not remained conscious. In order to make it conscious again, in spite of this, it was necessary to overcome something that fought against one in the patient; it was necessary to make an expenditure of effort on one’s own part in order to compel and subdue it. The amount of effort required of the physician varied in different cases; it increased in direct proportion to the difficulty of what had to be remembered. The expenditure of force on the part of the physician was evidently the measure of a _resistance_ on the part of the patient. It was only necessary to translate into words what I myself had observed, and I was in possession of the theory of _repression_. It was now easy to reconstruct the pathogenic process. Let us keep to a simple example, in which a particular impulsion had arisen in the subject’s mind, but was opposed by other powerful tendencies. We should have expected the mental _conflict_ which now arose to take the following course. The two dynamic quantities—for our present purposes let us call them “the instinct” and “the resistance”—would struggle with each other for some time in the fullest light of consciousness, until the instinct was repudiated and the charge[9] of energy withdrawn from it. This would have been the normal solution. In a neurosis, however, (for reasons which were still unknown) the conflict found a different outcome. The ego drew back, as it were, after the first shock of its conflict with the objectionable impulse; it debarred the impulse from access to consciousness and to direct motor discharge, but at the same time the impulse retained its full charge of energy. I named this process _repression_; it was a novelty, and nothing like it had ever before been recognized in mental life. It was obviously a primary mechanism of defence, comparable to an attempt at flight, and was only a fore-runner of the later developed normal condemning judgment. The first act of repression involved further consequences. In the first place, the ego was obliged to protect itself against the constant threat of a renewed advance on the part of the repressed impulse by making a permanent expenditure of energy, a _counter-charge_, and it thus impoverished itself. On the other hand, the repressed impulse, which was now _unconscious_, was able to find means of discharge and of substitutive gratification by circuitous routes and thus to bring the whole purpose of the repression to nothing.