their own trouble will often deny that the trouble exists, and deny it
quite honestly. But those who have become the physicians of the mind are
just beginning to learn how tremendous a sacrifice the world has asked of
women in the past while denying that it was a sacrifice at all!

Now, this repression follows, in many women and in a considerable number
of men, on the assumption that there is something in sex too shameful to
be spoken about or looked at in the light. We set out, I repeat, on our
campaign without a map of the country and with our compasses pointing the
wrong way. And this, above all, is true when repression has caused some
actual perversion in the mind, some arrested development, some abnormal
condition. This is not always the consequence of deliberate repression on
the part of the individual, but it is, I believe, often the consequence
of an artificial state of civilization; an attitude towards a great and
wonderful impulse which has perverted our whole view of what is divine and
lovely in human nature. Whatever the cause, the result is abnormality of
some kind, and to people who have suffered so, I want, above all, to say
this: light and understanding are needed more by you, perhaps, than by
anyone else, and to you, above all, they have been denied. Loneliness,
isolation, the loss of self-respect, the darkness of ignorance have
surrounded those to whom the sacrifice has been hardest, and, therefore,
the repression, whether racial or individual, most disastrous. You can,
if you choose, leave the world a nobler place because you let light in on
these dark places. Do not say to yourselves that your suffering is useless
and purposeless because it is no good to anyone: no one knows of it: no
one understands it: and, therefore, it has all the additional bitterness of
being to no purpose. That need not be true. Ignorance need not continue.
If you will try to make your suffering of service to the world, it is not
difficult to measure how great may be our advance in fundamental morality
in this present generation.

We do not know yet of what human nature is capable, and those who are
studying the human mind are perhaps the greatest of all pioneers at the
present moment. Some of you have trusted me, and by your trust have enabled
me to help other people. Others of you, perhaps, have yourselves become or
will become students of psychology. You will advance a little further in a
science which is as yet only makin