The Long Handicap

Into the vocabulary for the interpretation of human conduct have come certain significant phrases. Many of them had their origin in the study of abnormal psychology. The transference of the terminology—defence-mechanism, complex, repression—with the ideas, the attitude, the method of analysis from which the captions arose, marks the first great stride into the mysterious region of man's psychical nature. Scientists are slow to accept “psychoanalysis “; they scoff at the interpretation of dreams, and point out the weakness in the reasoning by analogy which characterizes Jung's development of the Œdipus-theory.

The very psychologist who scoffs does, however, employ in his analysis of conduct these phrases: defence-mechanism, conflict, repression. Education is giving slow credence to the contribution of the new method to the problem of child-training. Criminal science has begun to explain aborted citizens in these terms of repression. Holt, in The Freudian Wish, redefines ethics in psychoanalytical language. In social psychology, the importance of racial history in its development of the instincts of human beings is admitted, as well as the vast significance of the environment against which these instincts must project themselves.

There has as yet been no particular attempt to apply this science of the unconscious life of human beings to the problems involved in the development and present character of women. It may be of interest to suggest such an attempt. If, in the racial history of women, and in the present-day development of a female individual, there appear more causes for suppression than in the life of the male, more occasions on which the individual is incapable of clear and direct functioning toward its environment, then there may appear an explanation other than sex-differentiation for various qualities attributed to women, such as lack of creative ability.

For example, an examination of the effect upon women of the tabus existing in primitive tribes in regard