is not discovered. But whenever the memory of his theft comes back to him, he re-experiences the painful
humiliation and guilt; he strives to banish the memory, he hastily turns his attention elsewhere, telling himself, in
effect, "I don't want to remember. I wish it would go away and leave me alone!" After a while, it does.
He no longer has to eject the memory from conscious awareness; it is inhibited from entering. It is repressed. The
act of banishing the memory has become automatized.
Should the memory ever begin to float toward the surface of awareness, it is blocked before it can reach him. A
kind of psychological alarm-signal is set off and the memory is again submerged.
Twenty years later, he may encounter the friend from whom he stole the money and greet him cheerfully; he
remembers nothing of his crime. Or he may feel vaguely uncomfortable in his friend's presence and disinclined to
renew the acquaintance—but with no idea of the reason.
Repressed memories are not always as localized and specific as in this example. Repression has a tendency to
"spread out," to include other events associated with the disturbing one—so that memories of entire areas or periods
of a man's life can be affected by the repressive mechanism.
People with traumatically painful childhoods sometimes exhibit something close to amnesia concerning their early
years. They do not simply repress individual incidents; they feel that they want to forget the events of an entire
decade, and they often succeed to a remarkable extent. If any questions about their childhood are raised, they may
feel a heavy wave of pain or depression, with very meager, if any, ideational content to account for it.
Thoughts and evaluations, like memories, may be barred from awareness because of the pain they would invoke.
A religious person, for example, might be appalled to find himself entertaining doubts about his professed beliefs;
he condemns himself as sinful and, in effect, tells these doubts, "Get thee behind me, Satan"—and the doubts
retreat from his field of awareness. A first, he evades these doubts; later, it is not necessary: he has repressed them.
He may then proceed to reinforce the repression by intensified expressions of religious fervor, which will help to
divert his attention from any lingering uneasiness he cannot fully dispel.