REPRESSION
§1
One other faculty of the unconscious mind requires special mention, and
that is its power of obliterating memories from the conscious mind,
or as it is better termed, of _repressing_, since this word not only
implies pushing out of consciousness, but also preventing from coming
into consciousness. It is found that all persons have formed a regular
habit of forgetting or partially forgetting, (and so disguising),
things which are unpleasant to them. This especially refers to those
things which are unpleasant to their self-respect, their moral beliefs
and ideas, and their general pride in themselves. The primitive
immoralities and thoughts and actions of early childhood which would
now offend their æsthetic and moral susceptibilities, are, more or
less, completely put out of sight, together with a host of unpleasant
ideas and thoughts which have cropped up from childhood onwards.
Indeed, there is a general tendency for anything of an unpleasant
nature to be pushed out of sight.
Darwin, in his autobiography, states, “I had, during many years,
followed a golden rule, namely that whenever a published fact, a new
observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general
results, to make a memorandum of it without fail, and at once, for I
had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt
to escape from the memory than favourable ones.”
We had a further example in the case of the house-surgeon who “forgot”
to put out his light, and examples are extremely common in everyday
life. We forget to post letters entrusted to us against our will, but
we do not forget to post our own love-letters. We mislay bills very
readily, but rarely do we mislay a cheque.
Amongst my patients suffering from shell-shock, I have had very many
hundreds who have completely forgotten some of the most unpleasant
and terrifying experiences which occurred to them out at the front.
Others unconsciously had found the easiest method of dealing with
the unpleasant past to be that of blotting the whole of it out,
dissociating it completely from their conscious mind, and then stating
that they remembered nothing of their lives until they woke up in
hospital. It is not only memories, however, which are repressed and
remain dormant in the unconscious mind. Most of our primitive instincts
handed on from our savage forefathers before even the evolution of man
in his present form, lie similarly buried in this unconscious part of
the mind, and we are wont to deny emphatically that we possess these
unpleasant instincts. Nevertheless, just as _in utero_ we repeat more
or less in detail the history of our physical evolution, so do we at
that period and in childhood repeat to a great extent the history of
our psychic evolution; and just as during this early period we possess
the physical attributes of many of our ancestors, such as the gills
of the fish or the tail of the lower vertebrates, so psychically do
we at a somewhat later period, possess the instincts and desires of
our progenitors, and utilise them as the hidden foundation stones
in building our adult mental constitution. These various primitive
instincts include all kinds of desires which would consciously be
regarded as sexual perversions and moral crimes of different kinds, and
they are present in all of us without exception. Our upbringing and
conscious outlook upon them, however, causes them to be so abhorrent to
us, that we successfully keep the majority of such ideas and feelings
_from ever coming out of the unconscious in their primitive form_.
In other words, we repress them. Occasionally, however, there is a
tendency for these ancestral instincts to become conscious, and in
our further efforts to prevent this we may develop instead hysterias,
obsessions and unreasonable fears, together with many other nervous
and abnormal signs and symptoms, into the nature of which it is not
my intention to inquire further in this present volume. Those who
are interested in pursuing this line of investigation will find an
elementary account of it in a previous work of mine, “The Elements
of Practical Psycho-Analysis.” All that I wish to emphasise here
is that we do push out from the conscious mind unpleasant thoughts
and memories, that we do repress and keep in the unconscious mind
unpleasant desires and instincts, and that we do, as a result of this,
have many unconscious or semi-conscious conflicts within ourselves,
which may lead to unpleasant feelings of depression, irritability,
fear, or in more pronounced cases hysterias, obsessions, and even
permanent mental derangement.
§2
A further and somewhat important result of our possessing so much
which is unconscious and of having so many feelings and ideas in
consciousness of which we do not know the origin, or of whose
origins we have but the vaguest and haziest notion is known as
_rationalization_. This word signifies that we find reasons for doing
or believing things which are of a pleasant nature and agreeable to us,
and _vice versa_.
Following on this rationalisation comes also a certain conservatism,
which tends to retard progress of any sort, which dislikes looking at
new ideas, and this for a very obvious reason. Looking at new ideas,
examining ourselves or our work very closely, has a tendency to bring
to light, from time to time, the very primitive instincts and feelings
which we have been at so much pains to repress. And rather than submit
to the indignity of discovering how really imperfect we are, and having
our pride in our divinely constituted natures shaken, we have acquired
a habit of denying and fighting strenuously against discovering truths
connected with either our moral or physical evolution which would be
unpleasant to us. In the light of our upbringing, such new truths are
often unpleasant, therefore we rationalise that they must be untrue.
For having been educated to venerate logic and reason, we can only
be satisfied with any given conclusion we come to when we feel that
it is justifiable in the light of logic and reason. But the logic of
rationalisation is false logic.
For many years, scientific and popular thought denied strenuously the
possibility of the now universally accepted theory of human evolution;
and on scientific grounds it was urged, with much plausible reasoning,
that it was not possible to develop a high type like man from any low
form of animal. On religious grounds it was argued equally passionately
that if evolution were true, the Bible was wrong, God disappeared, and
therefore the theory of evolution was untrue. The real reasons lying
behind those reasons advanced by both the scientist and the general
public, however, were not the reasons so carefully thought out by
them, but consisted largely in the fact that they did not wish to find
that the body, which they had hitherto thought a special and divine
creation partaking of the miraculous, to be merely a stage in the
evolution of life on this planet, and possibly not a final stage at
that. For in that case, no longer would man be able to flatter himself
that he was almost divine, he would have to relegate himself to the
possibility of being in a stage of semi-barbarism; he would no longer
be a final perfect product, but merely a half-finished article. It was
this blow to his pride that he could not stand. And it is the same
to-day. Whenever there is a likelihood that examination, particularly
through research work, has thrown light on his psychic evolution,
on the imperfections of his moral laws, or on the crudity of some
conventional custom, the process which takes place in him is much the
same.
Firstly, dislike of the idea. Secondly, on further examination of it,
hatred of the idea. Thirdly, rationalisation directed against the idea.
Fourthly, contentment, in that he has proved by logic and reason that
the idea is wrong. Hence, it is that the truth takes long to emerge,
and that obsessions and hysterias, and even trivial abnormalities are
difficult to cure, for the cure involves seeing our own imperfections
naked and undisguised.
In all these cases, we are trying to keep out of consciousness those
things which will distress us or cause us to have conflicts, or to have
to readjust our views of ourselves, or in fact cause us unpleasantness
in any form. It will be noticed that I have mentioned pride in the
belief that we have reached a condition of final development, and in
our superiority over the rest of nature, as being one of the important
factors in preventing our advance. It is to the development of this
pride, and its ramifications that I am devoting the major portion of
this book.