deration would show that his career would advance much more rapidly
if he were not burdened with a family. Again, an individual marries and
without even admitting to himself that his marriage is a failure he
gradually shuts himself off from any emotional expression--protects
himself from the married state by sublimating his natural domestic ties,
usually in some kind of engrossing work, but often in questionable
ways--by hobbies, speed manias, and excesses of various kinds. In
connection with this it is interesting to note that the automobile,
quite apart from its utilitarian value, is coming to be a widely used
means of repression or wish sublimation. I have been struck by the
enormously increasing number of women drivers. Women in the present
state of society have not the same access to absorbing kinds of works
that men have (which will shortly come to be realized as a crime far
worse than that of the Inquisition). Hence their chances of normal
sublimation are limited. For this reason women seek an outlet by rushing
to the war as nurses, in becoming social workers, pursuing aviation,
etc. Now if I am right in this analysis these unexercised tendencies to
do things other than we are doing are never quite got rid of. We cannot
get rid of them unless we could build ourselves over again so that our
organic machinery would work only along certain lines and only for
certain occupations. Since we cannot completely live these tendencies
down, we are all more or less "unadjusted" and ill adapted. These
maladjustments are exhibited whenever the brakes are off, that is,
whenever our higher and well-developed habits of speech and action are
dormant, as in sleep, in emotional disturbances, etc.

Many but not all of these "wishes" can be traced to early childhood or
to adolescence, which is a time of stress and strain and a period of
great excitement. In childhood the boy often puts himself in his
father's place; he wishes that he were grown like his father and could
take his father's place, for then his mother would notice him more and
he would not have to feel the weight of authority. The girl likewise
often becomes closely attached to her father and wishes her mother would
die (which in childhood means to disappear or go away) so that she could
be all in all to her father. These wishes, from the standpoint of
popular morality, are perfectly innocent; but as the children grow older
they are told that such wishes are wrong and that