Schopenhauer wrote much of the "will to live", which was, in his view, as unconscious as it was fundamental, and only secondarily gave rise to the conscious life of sensations and ideas. Bergson's "Élan vital" has much the same meaning. In a sense, the will to live is the fountain of all our wishes; in another sense, it is the sum total of them all; and in another sense, it is an abstraction, the concrete facts consisting in the various particular wishes and tendencies of living creatures. The will to live is not simply the will to stay alive; it is the will to live with all that that includes. Life is activity, and to live means, for any species, to engage in the full activity possible for that species.

The will to live is in a sense unconscious, since it is seldom present simply in that bald, abstract form. But since life is activity, any will to act is the will to live in a special form, so that we may perfectly well say that the will to live is always conscious whenever there is any conscious impulse or purpose.

In this simple statement we may find the key to all unconscious motives, disregarding the case of dissociation and split personality. If you analyze your motives for doing a certain act and formulate them in good set terms, then you have to admit that this motive was unconscious before, or only dimly conscious, since it was not formulated, it was not isolated, it was not present in the precise form you have now given it. Yet it was there, implicated in the total conscious activity. It was not unconscious in the sense of being active in a different, unconscious realm. The realm in which it was active was that of conscious activity, and it formed an {566} unanalyzed part of that activity. It was there in the same way that overtones are present in perceiving the tone quality of a particular instrument; the overtones are not separately heard and may be very difficult to analyze, yet all the time they are playing an important part in the conscious perception.

In the same way, we may not "realize" that we are helping our friend as a way of dominating over him, but think, so far as we stop to think, that our motive is pure helpfulness. Later, analyzing our motives, we may separate out the masterful tendency, which was present all the time and consciously present, but so bound up with the other motive of helpfulness that it did not attract attention to itself. Now if our psychology makes us cynics, and leads us to ascribe the whole motivation of the helpful act to the mastery impulse, and therefore to regard this as working in the unconscious, we are fully as far from the truth as when we uncritically assumed that helpfulness was the only motive operating.

For man, to live means a vast range of activity--more than can possibly be performed by any single individual. We wish to do a thousand things that we never can do. We are constantly forced to limit the field of our activity. Physical incapacity, mental incapacity, limitations of our environment, conflict between one wish and another of our own, opposition from other people, and mere lack of time, compel us to give up many of our wishes. Innumerable wishes must be laid aside, and some, resisting, have to be forcibly suppressed. Renunciation is the order of the day, from childhood up to the age when weakness and weariness supervene upon the zest for action, and the will to live fades out into readiness to die.

What becomes of the suppressed wishes, we have already briefly considered. [Footnote: See p. 533.] We have noticed Freud's conception {567} that they live on "in the unconscious". Nothing ever learned, he would say, can ever be forgotten, and no wish ever aroused can ever be quieted, except by being gratified either directly or through some substitute response. Each one of us, according to this view, carries around inside of him enough explosive material to blow to bits the whole social structure in which he lives. It is the suppressed sex wishes, and spite wishes growing out of thwarted sex wishes, that mostly constitute the unconscious.

These unconscious wishes, according to Freud, motivate our dreams, our queer and apparently accidental actions, such as slips of the tongue and other "mistakes", the yet queerer and much more serious "neurotic symptoms" that appear in some people, and even a vast deal of our serious endeavor in life. All the great springs of action are sought in the unconscious. The biologist, consciously, is driven by his desire to know the world of plants and animals, but what really motivates him, on this view, is his childish sex curiosity, thwarted, driven back upon itself, and finding a substitute outlet in biological study. And so, in one way or another, with every one of us.

All this seems to depart pretty far from sober reality, and especially from proved fact. It involves a very forced interpretation of child life, an interpretation that could never have arisen from a direct study of children, but which has seemed useful in the psychoanalysis of maladjusted adults. It is a far cry from the facts that Freud seeks to explain, to the conception of the infantile unconscious with which he endeavors to explain them.

Freud's conception of life and its tendencies is much too narrow. There is not half enough room in his scheme of things for life as it is willed and lived. There is not room in it even for all the instincts, nor for the "native likes and dislikes"; and there is still less room for the will to live, in {568} the sense of the zest for all forms of activity, each for its own sake as a form of vital activity. Any scheme of motivation, which traces all behavior back to a few formulated wishes, is much too abstract, as was illustrated just above in the case of the helpful act.

Freud is apparently guilty of yet another error, in supposing that any specific wish, ungratified, lives on as the same, identical, precise wish. A very simple instance will make clear the point of this criticism. Suppose that the first time you definitely mastered the fact that "3 times 7 are 21", it was in a certain schoolroom, with a certain teacher and a certain group of schoolfellows. You were perhaps animated at that moment by the desire to secure the approval of that teacher and to shine before those schoolfellows. Does it follow, then, that every time you now make use of that bit of the multiplication table, you are "unconsciously" gratifying that wish of long ago? To believe that would be to neglect all that we have learned of "shortcircuiting" and of the "substitute stimulus" generally. [Footnote: See p. 338.] That wish of long ago played its part in linking the response to the stimulus, but the linkage became so close that that precise wish was no longer required. The same response has been made a thousand times since, with other wishes in the game, and when the response is made to-day, a new wish is in the game. It is the same with the biologist. Suppose, for the sake of argument, what probably is true in only a fraction of the cases, that the biologist's first interest in making any minute study of animals arose from sex curiosity. As soon, however, as he engaged in any real study of animals, substitute stimuli entered and got attached to his exploring responses; and to suppose that that identical wish of long ago is still subconsciously active, whenever the biologist takes his microscope in hand, is to throw out all {569} these substitute stimuli and their attachments to many new responses, and to see in a very complex activity only one little element.

In making use of the conception of the unconscious to assist us in interpreting human conduct, we are thus exposed to two errors. First, finding a motive which was not analyzed out by the individual, and which was only vaguely and implicitly conscious, and formulating that motive in an explicit way, we are then liable to the error of supposing that the motive must have been explicitly present, not indeed in consciousness but in the unconscious; whereas the whole truth is exhausted when we say that it was consciously but only implicitly present--active, but not active all alone. Second, having traced out how a certain act was learned, we are apt to suppose that its history is repeated whenever it is performed afresh--that the wishes and ideas that were essential to its original performance must be unconsciously present whenever it is once more performed--neglecting thus the fact that what is retained and renewed consists of responses, rather than experiences. What is renewed when a learned act is performed is not the history of the act, but the act itself. In a new situation, the act is part of a new performance, and its motivation is to some degree new.

Though his theories are open to criticism, Freud has made important contributions to the study of personality. The same can be said of other schools of psycho-pathology. Jung and Adler deserve mention as representing varieties of psychoanalysis that differ more or less radically from that of Freud. Outside of the psychoanalytic school altogether, Janet and Morton Prince have added much to psychological knowledge from their studies of dissociated and maladjusted personalities. In endeavoring to assist the maladjusted individual, all these schools have much in common, since they all seek to bring to his attention elements in his personality {570} of which he is not clearly aware. Clear consciousness of implicit or dissociated elements in one's personality often proves to be a step towards a firmer organization of the personality and towards a better adjustment to the conditions of life.{571}