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 substitute goal. The ego is also satisfied for now it no longer has to repress the threatening id impulse. The paralysis lasts because it is less unpleasant than the conflict.

Freud thinks that conversion symptoms are mainly the "displacement 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 example. The soldier fears to advance further toward death, yet his ego-ideal of courage refuses to let him stay back. He is under tremendous emotional conflict. A nearby bursting shell solves the problem. 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 ordinary conditioning in that the substitution is unconscious. The subject 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 accompanies learning.

-89-