impulse; but again, he dare not express it. Some day he is under
unusually great conflict. He can feel the id tension in his arm which
wish is to strike the hated person. There is the opposing pull of his
ego which wants to restrain the act. Then suddenly, because of some
peculiarity in his nervous constitution or habits, the arm goes limp.
He cannot use it at all. He has solved the problem. The unethical
wish is to some extent relieved, the paralysis itself serving as a sub-
stitute goal. The ego is also satisfied for now it no longer has to re-
press the threatening id impulse. The paralysis lasts because it is less
unpleasant than the conflict.

Freud thinks that conversion symptoms are mainly the "displace-
ment of genital impulses onto apparently indifferent parts of the
body." ²² But the conversion process certainly occurs as a solution of
wish conflicts which involve no sexual element. Shell shock is an ex-
ample. The soldier fears to advance further toward death, yet his
ego-ideal of courage refuses to let him stay back. He is under tre-
mendous emotional conflict. A nearby bursting shell solves the prob-
lem. He is thrown down and stunned perhaps, but uninjured. If he
only were injured there would be no more conflict. He would be a
hero without further danger. He finds that it is difficult to arise. He
must be injured! His motives are too much for him. He is paralyzed
because of the tremendous psychic advantage of being paralyzed. He
is quite honest about it. If he believed himself well, there would be
no relief for his conflict. Therefore he does actually believe himself
injured. The phenomenon is related to hypnotic phenomena.

When the Armistice was made known in November, 1918, many
cases of shell shock in army hospitals suddenly recovered. This does
not mean that these men had been consciously pretending injury.
They could not help it that their nervous systems had learned the
hysterical technique of escaping conflict.

The Freudian substitutive dynamisms are said to differ from or-
dinary conditioning in that the substitution is unconscious. The sub-
ject does not know and cannot recall any experience of substituting
one reaction for another, or one stimulus for mother. Behaviorists
say that these Freudian substitutions are merely emotional (or other)
conditionings without the verbal conditioning which usually accom-
panies learning.

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