ck or fatigue,
represses or drives down certain ideas, perceptions, wishes, memories,
or complexes into the subconscious, where they remain, sometimes
dormant and passive but often dynamic, emotional, carrying on an
over-excited, automatic activity, freed from the control of reason and
the modifying influence of other ideas, and able to cause almost any
kind of disturbance. So long as there is team-work between the
various parts of our personality we are able to act as a unit; but
just as soon as we break up into factions with no communication
between the warring camps, so soon do we become quite incapable of
cooerdination or adjustment, like a nation torn by civil war. Many of
the seemingly fantastic and bizarre mental phenomena of which a human
being is capable are the result of this kind of disintegration.

However, nature has a remarkable power for righting herself, and it is
only under an accumulation of unfortunate circumstances that there
appears a neurosis, which is nothing more than a functioning of
certain parts of the personality with all the rest dissociated. We
shall later inquire more fully into the causes that lead up to such a
result and shall find that the mechanisms involved are these processes
of organization and disorganization by which mind is wont to group
together or separate the various elements within its borders.

SUMMARY

Gathering up our impressions, we find a number of outstanding
qualities which we may summarize in the following way:

The Subconscious is:

_1 Vast yet Explorable_

The fraction that could accurately show the relation of the conscious
to the unconscious part of ourselves would have such a small numerator
and such a huge denominator that we might well wonder where
consciousness came in at all.[26] Some one has likened the
subconscious to the great far-reaching depths of the Mammoth Cave, and
consciousness to the tiny, flickering lamp which we carry to light our
way in the darkness. However, ever the subconscious mind is becoming
explorable, and it may be that science is giving the tiny lamp the
revealing power of a great searchlight.

[Footnote 26: "The entire active life of the individual may be
represented by a fraction, the numerator of which is any particular
moment, the denominator is the rich inheritance of the
past."--Jelliffe: "The Technique of Psychoanalysis," _Psychoanalytic
Review,_ Vol. III, No. 2, p. 164.]

_2 Ancient yet Modern_

The lowest layers