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PARTISAN REVIEW
of one's own nature and in the acceptance of the laws that govern
it that the good life is to be found.
Freud's contribution lies in the continuities of which he made
us aware. The first of these is the continuity of organic lawfulness.
Accident in human affairs was no more to be brooked as "explana–
tion" than accident
in
nature. The basis for accepting such an "ob–
vious" proposition had, of course, been well prepared by a burgeon–
ing nineteenth-century scientific naturalism.
It
remained for Freud
to extend naturalistic explanation to the heart of human affairs. The
Psychopathology of Everyday Lite
is not one of Freud's deeper works,
but "the Freudian slip" has contributed more to the common ac–
ceptance of lawfulness in human behavior than perhaps any of the
more rigorous and academic formulations from Wundt to the present
day. The forgotten lunch engagement, the slip of the tongue, the
barked shin could no longer be dismissed as accident. Why Freud
should have succeeded where the novelists, philosophers, and aca–
demic psychologists had failed we will consider in a moment.
Freud's extension of Darwinian doctrine beyond Haeckel's
theorem that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is another contribu–
tion to continuity. It is the conception that in the human mind, the
primitive, infantile, and archaic exist side-by-side with the civilized
and evolved.
Where animals are concerned we hold the view that the most highly
developed have arisen from the lowest. ... In the realm of mind, on
the other hand, the primitive type is so commonly preserved alongside
the transformations which have developed out of it that it is superfluous
to give instances in proof of it. When this happens, it is usually the result
of a bifurcation in development. One quantitative part of an attitude
or an impulse has survived unchanged while another has undergone
further development. This brings us very close to the more general
problem of conservation in the mind. . . . Since the time when we
recognized the error of supposing that ordinary forgetting signified
destruction or annihilation of the memory-trace, we have been inclined
to the opposite view that nothing once formed in the mind could ever
perish, that everything survives in some way or other, and is capable
under certain conditions of being brought to light again ... (Freud,
Civilization and I ts Discontents,
pp. 14-15).
What has now come to be common sense is that in everyman there
is the potentiality for criminality, and that these are neither accidents
