For more than fifty years we have known, or could have known, that there is an unconscious to counterbalance consciousness. Medical psychology has furnished all the necessary empirical and experimental proofs of an unconscious psychic reality which demonstrably influences consciousness and behavior. All this is known, but no practical conclusions have been drawn from it. We still go on thinking and acting as if we were simplex and not duplex. Accordingly, we imagine ourselves to be innocuous, reasonable, and human. We do not think of distrusting our motives, or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world, but actually it is frivolous, superficial, and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and viewpoint of the unconscious. One can regard one's stomach or heart as unimportant or even worthy of contempt, but nevertheless overeating and overexertion have consequences which affect the whole man. Yet we think that psychic mistakes and their consequences can be erased by mere words, for 'psychic' means less than air to most people. All the same, nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all and still less a human world. Virtually everything depends on human soul and its functions. It is worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today when everyone admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided not by attacks of wild animals, by natural catastrophes, or by the danger of world-wide epidemics but rather by the psychic changes in man. Only an almost imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers' heads could plunge the world into blood, fire, and radioactivity. The technical means to this destruction are available to both sides. And certain conscious deliberations, uncontrolled by an inner opponent, can be all too easily indulged, as we have already seen from the example of one 'leader'. The consciousness of modern man still clings so much to outward objects that he believes them exclusively responsible, as if it were on them that decisions depended. That the psychic state of certain individuals could emancipate itself for once from the behavior. of objects is something that is considered far too little, although irrationalities of this sort are observed every day and can happen to everyone. The author's main purpose in writing this selection was to ______.