ABSTRACT
The crucial contribution of psychoanalysis has been the recognition that, the forces that operate in our minds are essentially personal agencies in the form of helpful/hostile figures in both the outside world and the inner environment. In severe cases, people get taken over by the destructive part of the personality and might even identify with it. The extreme version of this is probably what is happening when the paranoid schizophrenic murders a stranger on the tube train because he is being told to by a voice in his head. Although this kind of horror is, mercifully, rare, there are a great many people who are apparently leading normal lives, but in a very restricted and isolated way, because they have been taken prisoner by an artificial and destructive part of their mind. When a child is afraid of the dark, the gods and demons in the mind are being imagined to exist in the outside world.
