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After this statement, it is indeed not too presumptuous to suppose that the acquisition of lues was really that decisive event, which for our paretic type-setter signified the closing of a happy, and the beginning of an unhappy period of life, and which was determined by his insistence on his age. One may therefore assume that here the repression devolved upon an insufferably painful idea of having a calamitous “blood disease.” The “lues complex” is thus repressed, and the fixed age takes over the rôle of a memory cloak. In most cases simple repression of the idea does not succeed; ever and again it steps forward from the unconscious, and must be worked over anew, as for example, through conversion into the opposite; the idea of the fatal disease becomes the beginning of a new life.
Repression of Consciousness of Sickness in General.—On closer observation of the paretic, one observes that the repression of the infection which has occurred is only a special case of the fact that paretics especially wish to repress altogether insight into their disease. The patient mentioned before says upon admission: “I am here in the asylum; the physician has diagnosed me as insane.” He says his insanity consists in a “fixed stare”; he had severe spinal pains on account of which, he said, he was pensioned by the printer' union. But after a short time he became, as he says, the most healthy man; he was never sick; will never die, etc., etc. However, even from him, and in spite of the strongest repression, one can elicit certain evidences of insight into his disease. On one visit when the