The third essay Freud devotes to the nature and relationships of the unconscious. He begins by defending with a convincing logic the justification for accepting the idea of unconscious mental processes, but I do not think I need detain this society with the arguments used, though they should be of interest to the philosophers who still refuse to accept this idea. He then points out the confusion there exists between the conception of the unconscious as simply comprising all mental processes of which we are not aware and the more recent psycho-analytical one of a system or region of the mind having certain peculiar characteristics. In this connexion the difficult question is raised of the precise difference between an unconscious idea and a conscious one, and what happens when the former is converted into the latter. Of the two possibilities, a topographical conception according to which a fresh imprint of the idea is formed when it is made conscious, so that the old imprint can still subsist in the unconscious, and a functional one according to which a change occurs in the state of the idea, he inclines for various reasons to the latter, but points out later on that the difficulty comes partly from the question having been badly put, and that the essential change is of another order, which we shall presently come across. In discussing the vexed question of whether the unconscious comprises affects as well as ideas, he concludes that the real effect of repression is to hinder the excitation of an instinct from being transformed into affective expression, and that it owes this power to the circumstance that the outlets to affectivity (the bodily accompaniments of emotion) are to a great extent under the control of the preconscious, though, it is true, not so completely so as are the outlets to motor activity. When the repression is unsuccessful the affective process is able to develop, usually in the form of morbid anxiety, but in most cases only after a suitable substitutive idea in the preconscious has been discovered, to which the affect becomes attached; an outlet is in this way afforded for the affect. In repression the preconscious is invested with a countercharge1 (of interest, etc.), and if the repressed idea has ever been preconscious itself it is divested of its preconscious charge, which is probably used to reinforce the counter-charge, while it receives itself another charge from its unconscious associations. Almost always a substitutive idea in the preconscious comes to replace the repressed one, and the preconscious counter-charge is then localised to this. The whole process is beautifully illustrated by the growth of a phobia. The repressed impulse 1 I use the word " charge," taken from the science of electricity, to translate the German Besetzung.

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can manifest itself only in the form of anxiety, and this very soon gets attached to a suitable symbolic idea in the preconscious, which now can be stimulated either by an urge from the repressed impulse or by contact with the object corresponding to the idea, for instance an animal. If the person succeeds in altogether projecting the idea outwards he is safe from an attack of anxiety so long as he can, by suitable measures, avoid the external stimulation of the idea; he can then treat an instinct like an external stimulus and deal with it by means of flight. In most cases, however, the forward urge of the unconscious impulse compels him to localise the substitutive idea still further by investing its preconscious associations with a further counter-charge, a process which can go on indefinitely; this is what is called clinically the radiation of the phobia.

Freud goes on to enumerate the characteristics of unconscious mental processes. They are incapable of mutual contradiction, contain no idea of negation, and have no relation to time or to external reality; they are regulated solely by the pleasure-pain principle, and show the attributes of what Freud in the Traumdeutung called the 'primary process,' i.e. they undergo condensation and displacement with extraordinary freedom. Preconscious processes have exactly the opposite characteristics, a special feature being the capacity to inhibit any tendency towards discharge on the part of a significant idea. As to the relations between the two mental systems: the unconscious can be only slightly influenced from the side of consciousness; a very sharp division between the two is a mark of morbidity. When certain conditions are fulfilled, even a repressed unconscious impulse can cooperate with and reinforce a conscious one, without altering its state of repression otherwise. Preconscious derivatives of unconscious impulses have peculiar features, and are subject to a second censorship before being allowed to pass from the preconscious into consciousness, one which is non-existent for other preconscious processes.

It is from the study of paraphrenia that there is most to be learned about the differences and relationships between the unconscious and consciousness. In this disease a striking feature is the way in which the patients will utter freely what one would have expected to be unconscious and repressed, the censorship between the two mental systems having apparently been abolished, and the question arises what is the connexion between this and the other fundamental feature mentioned earlier, namely, the withdrawal of the libido from external objects on to the self. This difficult problem has been interestingly solved by Freud through a study of speech in paraphrenia, in a way that also throws

light on the whole matter of the difference between conscious and unconscious ideas. He starts from two fairly familiar observations and one original one. The first is the tendency paraphrenics have to express their ideas in terms of their bodily organs, so that one might term their language an 'organic' one. The second is the notable extent to which words are with them subject to the 'primary process' of condensation and displacement, with which one otherwise only meets in the unconscious. The new observation was that symbolism in paraphrenia depends far more on the idea of words than on that of things, and reflection on this brought Freud to realise that the most fundamental distinction between a preconscious idea and an unconscious one is that the former is made up of an idea of the object together with an idea of the corresponding word, whereas the latter consists only of the idea of the thing. From this conclusion follows an explanation of many important features of mental development, especially as regards the function of consciousness, which there is not time to expound here. It may be remarked incidentally that what repression of an unconscious idea essentially resists is its being translated into the words connected with the object. As to the paradox in paraphrenia that in spite of the withdrawal from the outer world, which one would expect to affect most the more conscious levels of the mind, it is nevertheless the conscious attributes of thought, namely, words, that are most heavily charged with interest, Freud thinks that this feature represents a secondary healing process, an attempt to regain contact with the outer world, which takes ȧ path that is on the whole the reverse of the normal, proceeding, that is to say, from consciousness towards the unconscious.

In the fourth essay Freud reviews the theory of dreams in terms of his metapsychology, and in the light of the recent conception of sleep as a state essentially consisting in a restoration of the most complete form of narcissism, the wish to return to the mother's womb. As is known, the dream is the way in which the mind deals with disturbing thoughts from which it has failed to withdraw all interest, as it has done with other thoughts. These preconscious thoughts, remains from the mental activity of the preceding day, get reinforced from the stirring of an unconscious impulse with which they have become associated either on the day before or during sleep, and build thus a wish-fulfilment phantasy, the ideas of which undergo both a temporal and a topographical regression to the primary perceptual system. The results of this regression are projected outwards as on to a stage and are accepted by consciousness as complete reality. The formation of dreams shows interesting

differences from that of paraphrenic phenomena. In the latter there is no topographical regression, only a temporal one. In paraphrenia words themselves are subject to the 'primary process' of condensation and displacement: in dreams this is only exceptionally the case, namely, with words heard or read on the preceding day; otherwise any dream operations on words are only preparatory to the regression to the ideas of objects, and it is these ideas that are subject to the 'primary process.' In paraphrenia there is no intercourse between the investments of words and those of objects, in dreams such intercourse is unusually free.

Freud then discusses the nature of hallucination and the way in which consciousness is deceived as to its reality. He finds, by comparison of dreams with various psychotic states, that this deception can occur only when a thought has undergone regression through the unconscious memory-traces of objects to the primary perceptual system, and considers that the capacity to distinguish reality from illusion is a function of this system, the fundamental test being the ability to abolish a perception by means of appropriate motor activity. He regards this "testing of reality' as one of the distinct institutions of the ego, by the side of conscience and the censorship, and points out that in acute hallucinatory confusion (Meynert's amentia) this becomes split off from the rest of the ego. Consideration of the topography of the repression process in different conditions leads to the conclusions that in dreams all systems of the mind are divested of their charge of interest, in the psychoneuroses those of the preconscious, in paraphrenia those of the unconscious, and in Meynert's amentia those of consciousness.

In the last essay of the series Freud solves many of the riddles of melancholia, as he has before those of many other neurotic and psychotic affections. He starts by analysing the dynamic mechanisms operative in the state of normal grief, by means of which the desire to live is ultimately enabled to triumph over the wish to die and share the fate of the lost object, and love becomes gradually released from its former attachment and free to form new ones. Melancholia differs from this normal process both in its outcome and in certain of its manifestations. The symptoms of painful depression, abrogation of interest in the outer world, loss of capacity to love, and inhibition of effort, are common to both, but, whereas in grief it is the world that is felt to be poor and empty, in melancholia it is the self that feels poor, worthless, and pervaded with a conviction of (especially moral) inferiority. Further, the loss that has been endured is an unconscious one, not, as with grief, a conscious one. Careful observation shows that the abuse which a melan

cholic heaps upon himself really represents complaints directed against a person he formerly loved, and this is the reason why he is not ashamed of his supposed deficiencies and does not behave as though they were true, conducting himself rather as someone who has been unjustly wounded. What has happened is that after some disappointment or injury connected with the loved person he has withdrawn his love from this object, but instead of transferring it to a new one, as the normal person would, or introverting it on to unconscious phantasies, as the neurotic does, or, again, applying it to the ego, as the paraphrenic does, he replaces it by a narcissistic identification of the self with the former object, there being in this process doubtless a regression to the original narcissistic way in which he fell in love. Analysis seems to show that three conditions are necessary for this outcome: first an actual loss, as in grief, though the loss is more often due to disappointment than to death; secondly the combination of a strong narcissistic fixation on the loved object with a lack of resistance in its investment; and thirdly a marked ambivalency, as in the obsessional neurosis. The ego thus becomes split; one part, to which the conscience belongs, can criticise, abuse, and hate the other part formed by fusion with the idea of the object. It is this ability to treat the self as an object which makes suicide possible, and there is an interesting discussion of this matter. Freud incidentally contrasts the narcissistic identification present here with the common hysterical identification, in which, on the contrary, some connexion with the idea of the real object is retained. The fixation-point characteristic of melancholia, which is intermediate between the fixation-points of paraphrenia and the obsessional neurosis, he places in the first pregenital stage known as the oral phase of the libido; doubtless to be correlated with this is the fact that also the psychology of melancholia is intermediate between that of these two affections. He does not maintain that his conclusions are valid for all forms of melancholia, and thinks it possible that certain forms might be produced by a toxic impoverishment of the ego-libido. In conclusion he discusses the more obscure problem of mania as representing the triumph of the opposite side of the ego in the intrapsychical conflict.

At the end of this review I am even more conscious of its deficiencies than I expected at the beginning to be, and can only hope from it that it will serve to stimulate some of you to study at first hand the works with which I have dealt so inadequately. It is only fitting that I should conclude by expressing one's gratulation and indebtedness to Professor Freud that he has been able to accomplish so much in the most trying and difficult circumstances.