Repression: anatomy, purpose, and irony

Notes on The Ego and the Id, Chapter 1

“It is to this ego that consciousness is attached… From this ego proceed the repressions, too.”

The act of repression: activating resistances upon certain mental and emotional tracks, keeping them away from our conscious processes.

The analyst’s work is all about bringing what is repressed to the fore, allowing the patient to let go of their resistances and see how much mental energy was given to the singular task of bridling some feeling, memory, or idea.

I feel the truth of this irony, even if I can’t name a specific example in myself: my whole life can be exhausted by what it takes to repress some feeling or thought or memory (exhausted, as in emptied of its energy because of the energy it takes to actively repress the unwanted material; but think, too, of the broad, non-psychological, meaning of depression (hollow, sunken, emptied out), and it will not be hard to connect the status of mental illness to this task of the ego to hold at bay certain mental influences it deems unworthy of its outwardly perceivable character). The irony being: we allow the work of repression to take over so much of our lives despite the fact that repression is meant to keep its object from taking over a life in the first place.

Even if I broaden the concept to the act of hiding things in general, it feels true: whatever I attempt to cover up, comes to dominate.