in the dreams, ideas, persons, and
experiences appeared that never came upon the stage of the conscious.
From that finding he developed the concept of repression, i.e., the
relegation of a painful experience into the unconscious, and kept
imprisoned there by the censor. Also how there it became the complex,
which, like a stage manager, never appeared before the footlights of
the conscious, but determined its content just the same by inhibition
or stimulation of any character or scene to be enacted upon it.

A complete critique of Freudianism cannot be attempted here. But in
relation to the endocrine system as controllers of nerve function
in health and disease, a valid criticism can be made. Firstly, the
Freudian jargon, its technicalities and explanations, are metaphors.
Some may regard them as justifiable descriptions of mental processes.
But it certainly can be urged against them that they provide us with
no idea concerning what is happening in the cells of the body and
brain as explanation for the event, normal or abnormal, supposedly
explained. Words like sublimation or transference are figures of
speech and nothing else. Secondly, they ignore totally the powers of
the vegetative apparatus, the viscera, muscles and secreting glands
together, as originators and determiners of the wish and its
adventures.

How utterly different, from the point of view of the physiologist, the
two explanations are as pictures, can be seen from a single example.
The idea of repression, to the Freudian, means the pushing down
into the subconscious of some experience. Pushing down is a process
controlled by the laws of physics: it involves the concepts of matter
and force. Hence, the expression, as a description of a psychic
episode, is a metaphor pure and simple. From the standpoint of the
process of repression as pictured by the student of the vegetative
apparatus, the term signifies a real bottling up of energy. For the
repression means actual compression of muscle, the muscle contained
in the viscera. And the repression means a real interference with
the release of energy, which remains bound up, tugging for room
for expression as much as a spring tightly coiled in a box. In the
production of that tension an endocrine has often been decisive. The
endocrine nature of the individual may decide whether a subconscious,
i.e., visceral or vegetative tension, is to come into being, live
or die, in the face of a given situation. If thereb