s what we have now learned to speak
of, in relation to the Mind, as the Unconscious.

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

To sum up these relations of the viscera, the endocrines, the
unconscious and the mind, it may be stated as a far-reaching
generality for the understanding of human life: that character and
conduct are expressions of the streams of energy arising in the
vegetative apparatus, primarily endocrine determined at birth, and
secondarily experience determined after the organism has learned to
react as a whole, as consciousness. The result of such a reaction as a
whole tends to balance the disturbance of energy, so as to maintain
or restore the equilibrium, or sense of harmony and comfort, when
consciousness again disappears. This law is an attempt at synthesis of
the labors of the psychanalysts, the behaviourists, and the students
of the internal secretions (Freud, Jung, Adler, Sherrington, Watson,
Von Bechterew, Kempf, Crile, Cannon, Cushing, Fraenkel are the
great names of the movement). Most of the details, and all of the
quantitative applications of the law still remain to be worked
out. But a statement like the following of Cushing, the eminent
surgeon-student of the endocrines, that "it is quite probable that the
psychopathology of everyday life hinges largely upon the effect of
ductless gland discharges upon the nervous system," shows which way
the wind is blowing.

In the face of these conceptions the position of the psychanalyst as a
practical therapeutist becomes clearer, and the causes of his failure
when he fails. In the first place, he deals with psychic results as
processes, and ignores the physiology of their production. Since a
true cure of the neurosis, what he is after, is impossible without a
removal of the cause, a disturbance in the vegetative apparatus, he
cannot succeed where an automatic adjustment among the viscera does
not follow his probings and ferretings of the unconscious. In the
second place, he disregards the existence of a soil for the planting
of the malign complexes in the individual in whom they grow and
flourish. That soil is composed in part of the endocrine relations
within the vegetative apparatus. And as we can often attack that soil
more effectively and radically from the endocrine end than from the
experience end (e.g., repressed episodes) we may transform the soil
and make it barren rock for morbid complexes, at any rate. The concept
of the endocrine-vegetative