as a great deal of the Freudian literature suggests. As a token of the error we may point out a characteristic touch in the Freudian interpretation of wit, or dream, or art, or even of moral effort, which it would be too strong to describe as cynical or blighting, and yet which distinctly verges in this direction, and from which Holt's own treatment is not wholly free (as p. 144), though he has done much to save a good clinical hypothesis from developing into a prevalent clinical suspicion. It should be clear that solely on Freudian principles[1] there is a radical difference between the repression which has preceded the self-analysis and avowal, and the moral effort of suppression or sublimation which must follow it if the discovered trait is to be corrected. Any moral effort whatever, no matter how free from self-deception, necessarily implies the continued presence in us of impulses which we must resist; it implies that there must be a censor with actual work to do. To this extent there will be double-mindedness; but there is all the difference in the world between a double-mindedness which is growing toward unity, and a double-minded-ness which is being cherished and smuggled along by some one of those many devices of compromise which Holt so justly condemns. I believe that most of the actual work of the censor in our consciousness is of the former sort (or of a mixed sort, with a good deal of the former ingredient in it); and that a call to unrestricted self-revelation would tend to undo in many minds the first stages of moral achievement. I believe this the more because in many cases, and perhaps in most common cases, the most effective method of moral improvement is not the Freudian method of scientific self-analysis. Something is to be said for a very different method, which without accepting Bergson's opposition between analysis and intuition, might well be described in terms of their contrast. Just as a certain element in the cure of diseased viscera is, at the proper stage of things, to forget that you have any viscera; so a certain element, and naturally a much larger element, in the cure of any moral disease is to forget that your feelings have an anatomy, and attend to wholeness of will
- ↑ Though I confess that Janet's account of dealing with a motive we wish to overcome seems to me more in accord with ordinary experience. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. IX, No. 1, pp. 28-9.
