will deny that viewed from whatever angle, the phenomenon of conscience is of crucial importance in life-social or personal. I t is conscience that separates human beings from animals. I would not be so bold as to say that it separates modern man from the primitive savage, for the primitive savage was already in every sense of the word a man of high conscience, perhaps even more so than modern man. Primitive man was hemmed in by all sorts of inhibitions, proscriptions and taboos, whereas modern man, limited as he is, enjoys a certain amount of freedom.Our entire social life is permeated with the influence of conscience; wherever we go we find tension. And tension is conflict-conflict of the individual with and within himself, conflict with society, and conflict of groups with groups. All these are disturbances of conscience. Wars, with all their devastating consequences, are the results of disturbed conscience; and peacetime life is also filled with interpersonal and internecine conflicts that are essentially disturbances of conscience. Conscience follows us wherever we go, awake or asleep. The slightest disturbance of it is expressed by guilt, which gives no rest. Guilt is the guardian who stands watch over conscience; it is the barometer that sensitively registers the least offense to our conscience. People probably differ from each other more by their type of guilt and conscience than by anything else. In the words of Stekel's exquisite figure of speech, there is lodged in our conscience a policeman, a judge, and an executioner.In more than one sense, the problems of psychiatry and psychic disturbances are diseases of conscience, and may best be viewed through the eye of conventional nosology. Take, for example, the functional psychoses : schizophrenia, paranoia, and cyclothymia. Is there a group of people anywhere in the world with a more tender, more sensitive conscience than the praecox? He is precipitated into panic reactions, not by a deed itself, but by the very thought of violating a code of established morals. The same may be said of the paranoid, whose persecutors are but the inverted images of his Warning and threatening conscience. The manic depressive is a close second. His mind is filled with images of craved but impossible transgressions. Unable to realize them, he escapes into psychosis; his severe and exacting conscience will not even permit him to cancel or neutralize his guilt by punishment.One might object by saying that these persons could not have the high conscience claimed for them, for they often commit crimes, including brutal murders. Yet even these murders, viewed in the light of analysis, are but dis-
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