ABSTRACT
No person can exist for himself alone, but must adapt himself to a complicated, almost unmodifiable milieu. Already in early childhood he must learn to renounce a great part of his natural impulses; when he is grown up, culture requires of him that he should even regard self-sacrifice for the community as something beautiful, good, and worth striving for. Psycho-analysis proceeded to show that this adaptation occurred with the help of a peculiar psychic mechanism, the essential feature of which is that the unfulfillable wishes, and the ideas, memories, and thought-processes belonging thereto, are submerged in the unconscious. The question is often asked why psycho-analysis ascribes so great a part in the etiology of the psycho-neuroses precisely to sexual repression. But those who ask this forget that since the beginning of time ‘hunger and love’ have ruled the world, that the impulses for self- and race-preservation are equally powerful instincts in every living creature.
