Note 232 — LECTURE XV INSTINCTS, SENTIMENTS, AND CONFLICTS

The repression of the sexual instinct and of sexual wishes plays the dominant rôle in the Freudian psychology. If a wish may be correctly defined psychologically as the impulsive force of a sentiment striving toward an end plus the pleasurable feeling resulting from the imagined attainment of that end, i.e., the imagined gratification of the impulse, then the repression of a wish belongs to the phenomena of repressed sentiments rather than of primitive instincts. This distinction, I think, is of some importance, as will appear when we consider subconscious sentiments.