NOT EVERYONE MANAGES TO FIND a balance between inner urges and social demands. Sometimes people fail to repress the things they unconsciously wish to repress, and the strangulated affects are converted into physical symptoms. Or, alternatively, they repress their drives to the extent of losing touch with this part of themselves and feel strangely empty as a result. In some cases, the reasons for the imbalance can be found in the nature of the social demands; one only needs to think of the uncompromising expectations of moral propriety placed on middle-class women in Freud's Vienna or Victorian England. In other cases, the imbalance between inner urges and social demands is rooted in individual circumstances.

Regardless of whether the roots are of a more social or a more individual nature, the question that arises is the same: what can be done about the imbalance? How can a more stable state of mind be achieved? The obvious solution is to change the social or personal conditions. Here, however, we run into a serious difficulty. For what are these social and personal conditions that need changing? What precisely is it that someone with hysterical symptoms or someone who feels empty is suffering from? This seems impossible to tell because the processes we are dealing with are unconscious. The urges have been pushed out of consciousness and have therefore become unconscious.