new and more positive significance by the investigations of Sigmund Freud and the Psycho-Analysts.[1]
No doubt many other social phenomena such as strikes, wars, popular elections, and religious revivals, perform a similar function in releasing the subconscious tensions. But within smaller communities where social relations are more intimate and inhibitions more imperative, there are many exceptional individuals who find within the limits of the communal activity no normal and and healthful expression of their individual aptitudes and temperaments.
The causes which give rise to what are here described as "moral regions" are due in part to the restrictions which urban life imposes; in part to the license which these same conditions offer. We have until very recently given much consideration to the temptations of city life, but we have not given the same consideration to the effects of inhibitions and suppressions of natural impulses and instincts under the changed conditions of metropolitan life. For one thing, children which in the country are counted as an asset become in the city a liability. Aside from this fact it is very much more difficult to rear a family in the city than on the farm. Marriage takes place later in the city, and sometimes it doesn't take place at all. These facts have consequences the significance of which we are as yet wholly unable to estimate.
- Investigation of the problems involved might well begin by a study and comparison of the characteristic types of social organization which exist in the regions referred to.
- What are the external facts in regard to the life in Bohemia, the Half-World, the Red-Light District, and other "moral regions" less pronounced in character?
- What is the nature of the vocations which connect themselves with the ordinary life of these regions? What are the characteristic mental types which are attracted by the freedom which they offer?
- How do individuals find their way into these regions? How do they escape from them?
- To what extent are the regions referred to the product of the license; to what extent are they due to the restrictions imposed by city life on the natural man?
Temperament and social contagion.—What lends special importance to the segregation of the poor, the vicious, the criminal, and exceptional persons generally, which is so characteristic a feature
- ↑ Cf . Dr. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
