Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/486

480 The steps by which repression takes place in the simpler cases are not especially difficult to understand. When the child wants something it ought not to have, its mother hands it something else and moves the object about until the child reaches out for it. When the adult strives for something which society denies him, his environment offers him, if he is normal, something which is "almost as good," although it may not wholly take the place of the thing he originally strove for. This in general is the process of substitution or sublimation. It is never complete from the first moment of childhood. Consequently it is natural to suppose that many of the things which have been denied us should at times beckon to us. But since they are banned they must beckon in devious ways. These sometime grim specters both of the present and of the past can not break through the barriers of our staid and sober waking moments, so they exhibit themselves, at least to the initiated, in shadowy form in reverie, and in more substantial form in the slips we make in conversation and in writing, and in the things we laugh at; but clearest of all in dreams. I say the meaning is clear to the initiated because it does require special training and experience to analyze these seemingly nonsensical slips of tongue and pen, these highly elaborated and apparently meaningless dreams, into the wishes (instinct and habit impulses) which gave them birth. It is fortunate for us that we are protected in this way from having to face openly many of our own wishes and the wishes of our friends.

A few years ago when this doctrine was first advanced by Sigmund Freud, the noted psycho-pathologist at Vienna, it raised a storm of opposition, not only from the staid, home-loving, every-day men and women, but from scientific men as well (objection to the view seems to stand in almost direct ratio to the amount of repression the individual possesses). The truth of the matter is that Freud wrote mainly for his medical colleagues, but his words were taken up and bandied about by the press and by men who had not seriously studied them. This unjust treatment of Freud led a few physicians in this country, who had had personal contact with him, to champion his cause and to go so far as to say that they alone, with Freud, knew how to interpret dreams. Freudianism thus became a kind of cult, and the only devotees allowed openly to worship at the shrine were those who had had personal training under Freud. Fortunately science is objective, and whatever good there is in one man's work can usually be verified, although in the process of verification modifications are usually made which lead gradually to a satisfactory working basis. This belief in the objective nature of science has led many psychologists in this country who have not been fortunate enough to have personal contact with Freud to try out his methods and to attempt to verify his findings for themselves. They can do this without necessarily putting themselves on record as being