r interests and activities by a
preoccupation with the frustrated sex motive. Assaults and
lynchings, and the whole calendar of crimes of violence with
which our criminal courts are crowded, are frequent evidence
of the incompleteness with which man's strong primary instincts
have been suppressed by the niceties of civilization.
The phenomenal outburst of collective vivacity and exuberance
which marked the reported signing of the armistice at
the close of the Great War was a striking instance of those
immense primitive energies which the control and discipline
of civilization cannot altogether repress.

There has been, furthermore, a great deal of evidence adduced
in recent years by students of abnormal psychology
concerning the results of the frustration of native desires.
When the individual is "balked" in respect to particular
impulses or desires, these may take furtive and obscure
fulfillments; they may play serious though obscure and unnoticed
havoc with a man's whole mental life. Unfulfilled desires
may give rise to various forms of "complex," distortions of
thought, action, and emotion of which the individual himself
may be unaware. They may make a man unduly sensitive,
or fearful, or pugnacious. He may, for example, cover up a
sense of mortification at failure by an unwarranted degree of
bluster and brag. A particular baffling of desire may be
compensated by a bitterness against the whole universe or by
a melancholy of whose origin the victim may be quite unconscious.
These maladjustments between an individual's desires
and his satisfactions are certainly responsible for a
considerable degree of that irritation and neurasthenia which are
so frequently observable in normal individuals.[1]

[Footnote 1: While the evidence in this field has been taken
largely from extremely pathological cases, the distortions and
perversions of mental behavior, noticeable in such cases, are
simply extreme forms of the type of distortion that takes place
in the case of normal individuals whose desires are seriously
frustrated. See the very clear statement on the subject of
"repressions" and "conflicts" in R. B. Hart's _Psychology of
Insanity_.]

The facts enumerated above should make it clear why it is
difficult to modify, much less completely to overcome, these
strong original drives to action. They serve to emphasize
the fact that by control of instinctive responses is not meant
their suppression. For just as instinctive t