reproductive instinct which was trying to get expression. Speaking
technically, one repressed the other. The woman said to herself, "No,
I never could have had such a thought," and promptly forgot it.
Needless to say, this kind of handling did not kill the impulse.
Buried in the depths of her soul, it continued to live like a live
coal, until in later years, fanned by the wind of some new experience,
it burst into flame.

In this case the wish had originally flashed into awareness for an
instant, but very often the impulse never gets into consciousness at
all. The upper layers of the subconscious, where the acquired ideals
live, automatically work to keep down any desires which are thought to
be out of keeping with the person as he knows himself. He then would
emphatically deny that such desires had ever had any place in his
life.

Freud has called this repressing force the psychic censor. To get into
consciousness, any idea from the subconscious must be able to pass
this censor. This force seems to be a combination of the
self-regarding and herd-instincts, which dispute with the instinct for
reproduction the right to "the common path" for expression.

A considerable part of any person's subconscious is made up of
memories, wishes, impulses, which are repressed in this way. Of course
any instinctive desire may be repressed, but it is easy to understand
why the most frequently denied impulse, the instinct of reproduction,
against whose urgency society has cultivated so strong a feeling,
should be repressed more frequently than any other.[23]

[Footnote 23: See foot-note, p. 145, Chap. VII.]