t of nervous
disorders revolutionized by these principles but floods of light are
thrown on such widely different fields of study as ancient myths and
folk lore, the theory of wit, methods of child training, and the
little slips of the tongue and everyday "breaks" that have until
recently been considered the meaningless results of chance.

[Footnote 34: _The Psychoanalytic Review_ and the _International
Journal of Psychoanalysis._]

=A Searching Question.= We find, then, that when we ask, "What makes
people nervous?" we are really asking: "What is man like, inside and
out, up and down? What makes him think, feel, and act as he does every
hour of every day?" We are asking for the source of human motives, the
science of human behavior, the charting of the human mind. It is hard
to-day to understand how so much reproach and ridicule could have been
aroused by the statement that the ultimate cause of nervousness is a
disturbance of the sex-life. There has already been a change in the
public attitude toward things sexual.

Training-courses for mothers and teachers, elementary teaching in the
schools, lectures and magazine articles have done much to show the
fallacy of our old hypersensitive attitude. Since the war, some of us
know, too, with what success the army has used the Freudian principles
in treating war-neurosis, which was mistakenly called shell-shock by
the first observers. We know, too, more about the constitution of
man's mind than the public knew ten years ago. When we remember the
insistent character of the instincts and the repressive method used by
society in restraining the most obstreperous impulse, when we remember
the pain of such conflict and the depressing physical effects of
painful emotions, we cannot wonder that this most sharply repressed
instinct should cause mental and physical trouble.

=What about Sublimation?= On the other hand, it has been stated in
Chapter IV that although this universal urge cannot be repressed, it
can be sublimated or diverted to useful ends which bring happiness,
not disaster, to the individual. We have a right, then, to ask why
this happy issue is not always attained, why sublimation ever fails.
If a psycho-neurosis is caused by a failure of an insistent instinct
to find adequate expression, by a blocking of the libido or the
love-force, what are the conditions which bring about this blocking?
The sex-instinct of every respectable person is subject to restraint.
Some