n nature
adapts him that the thwarting of instincts becomes inevitable.
Impulses, in the first place, arise capriciously, and one
of the conditions of our highly organized life is regularity and
canalization of action. Our businesses and professions cannot
be conducted on the spontaneous promptings of instinct.
The engineer, the factory worker, the business man, cannot
allow themselves to follow out whatever casual desire occurs
to them whenever it occurs. Stability and regularity of procedure,
demanded in most professions, are incompatible with
random impulsive behavior. To facilitate the effectiveness
of certain industries, for example, it may be necessary to
check impulses that commonly receive adequate satisfaction.
Thus it may be essential to enforce silence, as in the case of
telephone operators or motormen, simply because of the demands
of the industry, not because there is anything intrinsically
deserving of repression in the impulse to talk.

Again, the mere fact that a man lives in a group subjects
him to a thousand restraints and restrictions of public opinion
and law. A child may come to restrain his curiosity when he
finds it condemned as inquisitiveness. We cannot, when we
will, vent our pugnacity on those who have provoked it; we
cannot be ruthlessly self-assertive in a group; or gratify our
native acquisitiveness by appropriating anything and everything
within our reach.

But because there are all these social forces making for the
repression of instincts, it does not mean that these latter
therefore disappear. If any one of them is unduly repressed,
it does not simply vanish as a driving force in human behavior.
It will make its enduring presence felt in roundabout
ways, or in sudden extreme and violent outbursts. Or, if it
cannot find even such sporadic or fruitive fulfillments, "a
balked disposition" will leave the individual with an uneasiness
and irritation that may range from mere pique to serious
forms of morbidity and hysteria. A man may for eight or ten
hours be kept repeating the same operation at a machine in a
factory. He may thereby repress those native desires for
companionship and for variety of reaction which constitute
his biological inheritance. But too often postponed satisfaction
takes the violent form of lurid, over-exciting amusements
and dissipation. The suppression of the sex instinct
not infrequently results in a morbid pruriency in matters of
sex, a distortion of all othe