ne endeavors to
unearth by means of psychoanalysis the pathogenic unconscious mental
impulses, or if one endeavors to bring to consciousness some instinctive
biologic craving which may be responsible for the individual's conscious
behavior, one regularly encounters a very strong resistance on the part
of the patient, a force is regularly betrayed whose object it seems to
be to prevent them from becoming conscious and to compel them to remain
in the unconscious. This is Freud's conception of the principle of
resistance and from its constant coming to the fore whenever an endeavor
is made to penetrate into the unconscious, Freud deducts that the
same forces which today oppose as resistance the becoming conscious of
the unconscious purposely forgotten, must at one time have accomplished
this forgetting and forced the offending pathogenic experience out of
consciousness. This mechanism he terms repression. We spoke of an
offending pathogenic experience, or in other words what has been termed
a psychic trauma. But the same principle holds true of certain instincts
which because of their peculiar nature become engaged in a kind of
struggle for existence with the ethical, moral and esthetic attributes
of the personality and are thrust out of the conscious mental structure
as one might say by an act of the will.

We are especially concerned here with these inacceptable instincts, for
the elucidation of which a brief review of Freud's theories on sexual
instinct is essential.

Thoroughgoing and painstaking dissection of the human soul, such as has
been practiced by Freud for nearly a quarter of a century and by many
followers of his theories in the past decade, revealed to him a number
of unmistakable facts from the developmental history of the individual
which forced him to postulate his very radical and revolutionary
theories of the sexual instinct in man. Recent behavior studies in the
higher anthropoids have likewise revealed very interesting facts
concerning the sexual instinct of these animals. Freud was led to make
certain assertions from his painfully acquired experience, such as the
unfailing sexual agency in the causation of neurotic manifestations, and
that his experience of many years has as yet shown no exception to this
rule, which quite naturally provoked a good deal of bitter and fanatic
criticism not only from lay people but from experienced physicians. The
cause for this lies in the nature of the thing itself,