man's mental life and about the psycho-neuroses. These facts he formulated into certain principles, which may be summed up in the following way.
1 There is no chance in mental life; every mental phenomenon—hence every nervous phenomenon—has a cause and meaning.
2 Infantile mental life is of tremendous importance in the direction of adult processes.
3 Much of what is called forgetting is rather a repression into the subconscious, of impulses which were painful to the personality as a whole.
4 Mental processes are dynamic, insisting on discharge, either in reality or in phantasy.
5 An emotion may become detached from the idea to which it belongs and be displaced on other ideas.
6 Sex-interests dominate much of the mental life where their influence is unrecognized. The disturbance in a psycho-neurosis is always in this domain of sex-life. "In a normal sexual life, no neurosis." If a shock is the precipitating cause of the trouble, it is only because the ground was already prepared by the sex-disturbance.
Freud was perhaps unfortunate in his choice of the word "sex," which has so many evil connotations; but as he found no other word to cover the field, he chose the old one and stretched its meaning to include all the psychic and physical phenomena which spring
directly and indirectly from the great processes of reproduction and parental care, and which ultimately include all and more than our word "love." [33]
[33] ] Freud and his followers have always said that they saw no theoretical reason why any other repressed instinct should not form the basis of a neurosis, but that, as a matter of fact, they never had found this to be the case, probably because no other instinct comes into such bitter and persistent conflict with the dictates of society. Now, however, the Great War seems to have changed conditions. Under the strain and danger of life at the front there has developed a kind of nervous breakdown called shellshock or war-neurosis, which seems in some cases to be based not on the repression of the instinct of race-preservation but on the unusual necessity for repression of the instinct of self-preservation. Army surgeons report that wounded men almost never suffer from shell-shock. The wound is enough to secure the unconsciously desired removal to the rear. But in the absence of wounds, a desire for safety may at the same time be so intense and so severely repressed that it seizes upon the neurosis as the only possible means of escape from the unbearable situation. In time of peace, however, the instinct of reproduction seems to be the only impulse which is severely enough repressed to be responsible for a nervous breakdown.