anomaly. With some people, if a problem is to be solved, the unconscious produces a solution; this is criticized and rejected as impossible. Another and another solution is offered by the unconscious until the right one comes. This is characteristic of the creative thinker. The ordinary person gives up the quest after one or two failures. In what we may speak of as the genius type, temperamentally, failure puts no end to the process. Here it is the idea of solution which is compulsive rather than the specific attempts at solution. The common man can abolish the whole process with the conclusion "There is no solution" when a few attempts are unsuccessful. It is important to note that the genius cannot dismiss the problem if he would: he suffers from the idea of solution in a way highly analogous to the torture of the patient with compulsive thoughts.

We are thus confronted with our most central problem. Why should there ever be a persistence in an unprofitable train of thought? Yet this phenomenon is present in all gradations from the repetition in compulsive neurotics of ridiculous or abhorrent single ideas, through obsessive memories of real events, on to the maintenance of a train of thought apparently futile but ultimately adaptive. Here a paradox appears. The dismissal of maladaptive thoughts from consciousness seems to be an intellectual function and an exercise of what is called will-power. Now in other respects the people presenting such anomalies are neither weak-willed nor feeble-minded. In fact they are apt to be stubborn and, as a group, well above the average in intelligence. We are therefore forced to conclude that the compulsive thoughts are either unaffected by intellectual guidance and elaboration, which seems improbable, or else that intelligence is working merely in the interests of unconscious motivations.

An analogous puzzle is presented by the response to analytic treatment. According to theory, when unconscious lusts are brought into consciousness, they can be dealt with and controlled, an influence impossible to exercise so long as they are out of contact with the conscious personality. The control is effected through intelligence, a tool that is wielded by that peculiar mental activity we call the will. We should therefore expect that a person possessing a strong will and a good intelligence and confronted with the previously unconscious lawless elements in his personality, that have been expressing themselves as symptoms, would straightway begin to subjugate these aberrant impulses and recover. But I understand that psycho-analytical experience has shown repeatedly that, although compulsive neuroses are not invariably refractive to treatment, they are nevertheless extremely

difficult to eradicate. One gets the impression that, in spite of the discomfort the patients are experiencing, and much as they are obviously desirous of losing each specific symptom, they still are fearful of getting well for some queer reason. In the course of the analysis this reason becomes manifest: it is another symptom, subtle and deadly. We are all of us loath to part with our pet theories and prejudices, the types of reaction that are peculiar to our personalities. Yet we can listen to argument and, with an effort, we can change our attitudes towards many of the problems of life. The compulsive thinker has so much. difficulty in effecting such a change of outlook that it amounts to a symptom. A suggestion in this direction is a signal for panic or inconsolable dejection. If the patient be assured that his recovery depends on such a reorganization within himself, he thinks that that spells an impossibility or, at least, he acts as if that were his conclusion. He would rather worry along with his symptoms or give up the quest of mental comfort, even life itself, than submit to what seems to him a loss of his individuality.

This, it seems to me, is the immediate cause of the obduracy to treatment which the compulsive neurotics present. Curiously enough, the maintenance or abandonment of individuality seems to be the crucial factor in quite another type of regenerating experience, which is often singularly effective in abolishing symptoms. This is religious experience. Here the price that is paid for the inward peace and the associated self-control is the giving up of self. An excellent example of this is given in James' Varieties of Religious Experience. The subject had been a drunkard who, the day after his first religious experience, got drunk again. "About midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed myself to Him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was going to be destroyed, that He would take all from me, and I was willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it."

With this may be compared the reaction of a patient of mine to the suggestion that his symptoms would not disappear if he were unwilling to make any alteration of his attitude towards life. He was suffering from the repetition of harrowing memories, often taking the form of hallucinations, which had been coming on every night for months and deprived him of almost all his sleep. He was an unusually intelligent

and honest introspectionist. The time came when it was necessary to point out to him that he would never be able to utilize the facts and fancies revealed in the analysis unless he was prepared to modify his point of view. His reply was that this was tantamount to asking him to abandon his personality and that willy-nilly it was impossible. He said that he would struggle on for a while to see if his symptoms would disappear of themselves and that if they did not, he would commit suicide! Although his honesty and bravery were unusual, my experience would indicate that behaviouristically all patients of this class tend to show the same response to the first suggestion of what may be interpreted as a change in personality. This is one of our basic problems: why is the personality of the compulsive thinker so sacred; with what taboo is it guarded?

The last characteristic of this peculiar personality, which we must consider, is unconscious sadism. This was first discovered by Freud and has been confirmed by all other psycho-analysts. When compulsive ideas are concerned directly or indirectly with injury to others, their basis in unconscious sadism is sufficiently understandable to seem obvious—to any psycho-analyst, at least. But why there should be such a disproportion between sadism and the other partial impulses, is a real problem. To say that there has been a fixation at a sadistic stage comes dangerously near to tautology, unless it can be shown that there is a more or less constant type of influence at work in these people which has halted development at this point.

An even more puzzling conjunction is that of unconscious sadism with exercise of intelligence. The cruelty of wit, thanks to Freud's brilliant analysis, we can understand. But I suppose that others than myself have seen evidence in their patients of unconscious sadism motivating intellectual keenness that seems to have the discomfiture of no one in view. In other words mental acuity seems to be one mode of expression for sadism and this may be quite constructive in character. Constructive intelligence is at bottom fantasy-building. If the fantasies in question had the injury or destruction of others as their object, the association would be understandable. But evidence for this is often lacking. Of all the aberrations of sex none is, of its very nature, so definitely inimical to constructiveness as sadism. One might suspect that we were here dealing with some kind of a reaction formation. But sympathy the antidote to cruelty-although not destructive is certainly not constructive in tendency. It works much more for the maintenance of the status quo. The conclusion seems therefore justifiable that the

connection between sadism and constructive thinking is not direct and causal in spite of the intimacy of the association. We are consequently forced to look for some other impulse with constructive potentialities so closely integrated with the sadism that action of the one means action of the other, that they reinforce one another mutually. What can this X be?

A hint may, perhaps be secured by correlating this problem with the one before. The compulsive thinker acts as if in terror of loss of his personality. He also acts as if he must destroy something-something, moreover, that is dear to him, else it would not be sadism. Here, then, is the sketch of a conflict and, judged by its seriousness, a deadly one. Now in any fight the issue depends on the comparative powers of the antagonists. Weakening of self is strength to the opponent; strength to one's self is a weakening of the opponent. Thus we arrive at a clue. Our search must be for some conflict still progressing in the unconscious. The personality of the patient is threatened; he can protect himself by destroying another or by making himself the stronger. One characteristic of this hypothetical conflict must be pointed out at once. It is not a physical battle, for the patients do not present bodily symptoms. The sufferer from compulsions is harrowed by purely subjective woes and rarely presents anything more like physiological disturbance than stammering. (I can recall only two cases of compulsive thinking in which there were physical complaints and in both of these the whole clinical picture was singularly confused.) If the struggle be carried out on the mental plane, in terms of fantasies, this would naturally be a stimulus for intellectual activity—an activity that would have compulsive force, if the issue meant life or death.

To elaborate this hypothesis logically we must look for some conjunction of circumstances in childhood that would make such a strange conflict probable. This might be found in a marked discrepancy between the behaviour of the most-loved object and the characteristics assigned to this object in imagination. In other words it would be a sharp contrast between the characters of the real object and of the Imago. Before describing this situation further I must try to make clear just what I mean by the Imago and how it comes into being.

There appears in the analysis of psycho-neurotics and in the reconstruction of the delusions in the psychogenic psychoses a central theme occurring with extraordinary consistency. This is the Oedipus complex, which is an attachment to the parent of the opposite sex, expressed in the unconscious as a lust for complete and jealously exclusive possession,

so sexually coloured as to justify its description as incestuous. It is not difficult to account for the origin, repression and unconscious growth of this complex, if one is willing to assume that there is affection in the child for the parent showing him greatest tenderness and that the rudimentary sexual impulses of the child tend to follow the direction of existent emotional contact. This is an adequate explanation in nine cases out of ten, but the trouble is that ten cases out of ten seem to show it and in the tenth case the mother1 has never been affectionate and may even have been consistently forbidding or harsh in her attitude towards her child. Moreover careful histories may fail to reveal evidence for the child ever having shown affection for his mother, or the latter may have died shortly after the birth of the boy. Yet under all these circumstances the unconscious seems to contain this same Oedipus complex. It appears as if this were some innate tendency that developed as inevitably as learning to walk. A facile explanation is that it is an inherited and universal human characteristic. This view has been put forward by Jung and accepted by many, but it implies too much modification of current biological theory to be adopted lightly.

I have elsewhere outlined a scheme of development which avoids the embarrassments of Jung's theory and yet covers the clinical facts—indeed explains some otherwise puzzling ones. Briefly, this reconstruction makes the formation of the Oedipus complex the work of fantasy. We assume merely that the young child is subject to the stirrings towards affectionate human contact that are potentially sexual as they are potentially social. Their exact nature may be a matter of endless futile debate, but at least we are safe in assuming that it is their potentially sexual character which complicates their development. These stirrings tend inevitably to be focussed on the person who shows most tenderness to the child. In the upper classes of society this is probably most often a nurse. Interest in this object is first expressed in a purely automatic, instinctive way. That is, the reaction appears when the object is there to stimulate it and its absence causes nothing more than vague unrest. The child is unhappy but does not know what it wants. When consciousness develops two things happen. First, the child is now able to formulate its lack, it knows what it wants, it has some idea of the loved object. Second, together with consciousness, repression begins and the sexual potentialities of the union with the loved one are repressed. An unconscious is

1 Or father in the case of the girl. Throughout this paper I shall use the mother-son relationship exclusively, but merely as a matter of convenience.

2 Problems in Dynamic Psychology, p. 294 seq.