ABSTRACT
“THE unconscious is the infantile and that particular part of a person which has been separated from the personality at that time and hence has been repressed.” * In this formula, Freud once expressed his provisional judgment concerning the origin and nature of the subconscious which is important for us in this connection. Never has a psychologist ascribed to the first years of childhood, not merely to the hereditary endowment, so great an importance for the whole future conduct in life, as the father of psychoanalysis. Not only the dreams and ordinary performances of every-day life but also the highest achievements of art and poetry—we might add in his sense: also of morality and religion are dependent in high degree upon the impressions of childhood and outlined in these. Everywhere, he seeks to show infantile sources; even the thousandfold needs of the neuroses and psychoses, as well as the formation of character, take their origin in earliest child life and here receive their guiding impulses. As the tree has to suffer for a lifetime, for injuries done to it when just pushing its shoot above the ground, so also the human mind. And more: All neurotic troubles, so far as they proceed from mental causes, have an infantile previous history, without which they could not have come into existence.
