when personality becomes suppressed, or inhibited, or starts to do evil, and the person ceases to be human, then you can analyse and measure it to your heart's content.
This is a tremendous declaration of faith, which may or may not be true: but the justification for assuming that it is true lies, in my opinion, in the fact that it is impossible otherwise to form any relationship with another human being at all. If, having decided that the consciousness (which is the awareness and comprehension of the personality at any particular moment) can be analysed, one jumps to the conclusion that the whole personality can also be analysed in theory, one must have the courage to go on and ask what it would be like when it was possible to do it in practice? How would one behave towards a person, whose every action could be analysed, and therefore whose every future action predicted? The answer is “with Machiavellian cunning”. One would never say what one thought, only what one thought would have the desired effect on one's audience. One would never be a genuine person; one would always be playing a part, or putting on a facade. This is in fact an accurate description of how many people do behave - people who have fallen into the mistake of thinking that a world overshadowed by the fear of death is the real world; but I would hesitate a long time before admitting that it was the only way to behave. It seems to me much more likely to be true, and to conform much more nearly to the ability which we all have to form relationships with other people, to say that all true relationships preclude analysis, and can be analysed only insofar as they are defective.
If this is true, the results are very far reaching. It means for instance that the ego, and the Oedipus complex etc., are very interesting phenomena about man, but are in fact descriptions of fairly general deformities in men's personalities.