ever learned, he
would say, can ever be forgotten, and no wish ever aroused can ever be
quieted, except by being gratified either directly or through some
substitute response. Each one of us, according to this view, carries
around inside of him enough explosive material to blow to bits the
whole social structure in which he lives. It is the suppressed sex
wishes, and spite wishes growing out of thwarted sex wishes, that
mostly constitute the unconscious.

These unconscious wishes, according to Freud, motivate our dreams, our
queer and apparently accidental actions, such as slips of the tongue
and other "mistakes", the yet queerer and much more serious "neurotic
symptoms" that appear in some people, and even a vast deal of our
serious endeavor in life. All the great springs of action are sought
in the unconscious. The biologist, consciously, is driven by his
desire to know the world of plants and animals, but what really
motivates him, on this view, is his childish sex curiosity, thwarted,
driven back upon itself, and finding a substitute outlet in biological
study. And so, in one way or another, with every one of us.

All this seems to depart pretty far from sober reality, and especially
from proved fact. It involves a very forced interpretation of child
life, an interpretation that could never have arisen from a direct
study of children, but which has seemed useful in the psychoanalysis
of maladjusted adults. It is a far cry from the facts that Freud seeks
to explain, to the conception of the infantile unconscious with which
he endeavors to explain them.

Freud's conception of life and its tendencies is much too narrow.
There is not half enough room in his scheme of things for life as it
is willed and lived. There is not room in it even for all the
instincts, nor for the "native likes and dislikes"; and there is still
less room for the will to live, in {568} the sense of the zest for all
forms of activity, each for its own sake as a form of vital activity.
Any scheme of motivation, which traces all behavior back to a few
formulated wishes, is much too abstract, as was illustrated just above
in the case of the helpful act.

Freud is apparently guilty of yet another error, in supposing that any
specific wish, ungratified, lives on as the same, identical, precise
wish. A very simple instance will make clear the point of this
criticism. Suppose that the first time you definitely mastered the
fact that "3 times 7 are 2