sex all their lives. At the same time he showed that sexual desires and needs
are natural and vital for human beings. And thus, my dear Sophie, the stage is
set for a lifelong conflict between desire and guilt.”
“Don’t you think the conflict has died down a lot since Freud’s time?”
“Most certainly. But many of Freud’s patients experienced the conflict so
acutely that they developed what Freud called neuroses. One of his many
women patients, for example, was secretly in love with her brother-in-law.
When her sister died of an illness, she thought: ‘Now he is free to marry me!’
This thought was on course for a frontal collision with her superego, and was
so monstrous an idea that she immediately repressed it, Freud tells us. In
other words, she buried it deep in her unconscious. Freud wrote: ‘The young
girl was ill and displaying severe hysterical symptoms. When I began treating
her it appeared that she had thoroughly forgotten about the scene at her
sister’s bedside and the odious egoistic impulse that had emerged in her. But
during analysis she remembered it, and in a state of great agitation she
reproduced the pathogenic moment and through this treatment became
cured.’ “
“Now I better understand what you meant by an archeology of the soul.”
“So we can give a general description of the human psyche. After many
years of experience in treating patients, Freud concluded that the conscious
constitutes only a small part of the human mind. The conscious is like the tip
of the iceberg above sea level. Below sea level—or below the threshold of the
conscious—is the ‘subconscious,’ or the unconscious.”
“So the unconscious is everything that’s inside us that we have forgotten
and don’t remember?”
“We don’t have all our experiences consciously present all the time. But
the kinds of things we have thought or experienced, and which we can recall if
we ‘put our mind to it,’ Freud termed the preconscious. He reserved the term
‘unconscious’ for things we have repressed. That is, the sort of thing we have
made an effort to forget because it was either ‘unpleasant’,’improper,’ or
‘nasty.’ If we have desires and urges that are not tolerable to the conscious,
the superego shoves them downstairs. Away with them!”
“I get it.”
“This mechanism is at work in all healthy people. But it can be such a
tremendous strain for some people to keep the unpleasant or forbidden
thoughts away from consciousness that it leads to mental illness. Whatever is
repressed in this way will try of its own accord to reenter consciousness. For
some people it takes a great effort to keep such impulses under the critical
eye of the conscious. When Freud was in America in 1909 lecturing on psy-
choanalysis, he gave an example of the way this repression mechanism
functions.”
“I’d like to hear that!”
“He said: ‘Suppose that here in this hall and in this audience, whose
exemplary stillness and attention I cannot sufficiently commend, there is an
individual who is creating a disturbance, and, by his ill-bred laughing, talking,
by scraping his feet, distracts my attention from my task. I explain that I
cannot go on with my lecture under these conditions, and thereupon several
strong men among you get up and, after a short struggle, eject the disturber of
the peace from the hall. He is now repressed, and I can continue my lecture.
But in order that the disturbance may not be repeated, in case the man who