Freud's theory of the unconscious argues that most of what goes on with humans is at an unconscious level. We are like icebergs: what occurs consciously to us represents a tiny portion of who we are. We use our unconscious as a defense mechanism, Freud asserts, so that we can repress or deny thoughts our ego or superego finds unacceptable.

In this story, the narrator, Mabel, who feels inferior to other characters, has an old-fashioned dress made to wear to Mrs. Dalloway's party because she believes she cannot afford to be "fashionable." However, as soon as she arrives at the party she feels immediately "wrong" and miserable. She appears filled with self-loathing, much of it driven by the superego as suggested by the way she derides herself in religious terms. For example, she deserves, she thinks, to do "penance." She thinks, too, that she "deserved to be chastised" for her "orgy of self-love" in having her dress made. She casts her anguish in terms of having to undergo righteous punishment for her sin.

However, it's hard to escape the idea that Mabel is experiencing an enormous amount of anger and hostility toward other people at the party. She would perhaps find these aggressive impulses towards others unacceptable and so would repress them, turning them against herself. That she sees the others as the enemy is expressed in such images as feeling like a "dummy. . .for young people to stick pins into." In others words, the hostility she feels towards them as those who want to hurt her gets turned into a martyrdom she tells herself she deserves.

She reveals she is trying to repress her anger in thoughts such as wanting to imagine the others as flies so that she can be "numb, chill, frozen, dumb"—divorced from her own emotions.

This is underlined by the contrast to "an extraordinary bliss [that] shot through her heart" at the dressmaker's, Miss Milan's. Here, because she likes and feels comfortable with Miss Milan, she is not turning her anger inward and can feel, if only for a short time, that the "soul of herself" is made of something more and better than "vanity" and "self-love."

Interestingly, we are only given the stream-of-consciousness thoughts inside Mabel's head. We have no way to evaluate if her ideas that the others despise her and are laughing at her are true at all. However, given how extreme her self-loathing seems to be, we can imagine that we are offered a skewed view of both Mabel and the party.