ABSTRACT

One of the outstanding merits of psychoanalysts will be that they proved the fact of repression and recognized its significance; but the special manner in which the idea of repression is referred to early childhood has no scientific justification. According to the theory of psychoanalysis there exists, even in the little child, below a deceitful surface consciousness and apart from the outward expression of the innocent life of the moment, a many-sided, permanent mechanism of repressed desires and aims. Repression and the division it brings between the Conscious and Unconscious is therefore a phenomenon of development; it does not begin, as S. Freud thinks, in the young child with special force and that silent persistence which often does not give any sign of life until its late-effect in adult life, but as a rule has but minute and transitory beginnings.