To the extent that he cannot fully extinguish his frustrated, anguished desire for rationality, he feels guilty. Such is
the corruption that repression has worked on his thinking.
Now consider another case: a man who represses his idealism, i.e., his aspiration to any values above the level of
the commonplace.
When he was a boy, no one understood or shared his feelings about the books he read or the things he liked; no one
shared or understood his feeling that a man's life should be important, that he should achieve something difficult
and great. What he heard from people was: ''Oh, don't take yourself so seriously. You're impractical." He did not
strive to conceptualize his own desires and values, to weigh the issue consciously and rationally; he was hurt by
people's attitude; he felt like an outcast; he did not want to feel that way; so he gave up. If he saw a romantic movie
about some man's heroic achievement, he would remark to his friends, indifferently: " Not bad. But pretty corny,
wasn't it?"—and repress the memory of what he had felt in the theatre for two hours, protected by darkness. Now,
as a middle-aged Babbitt, he listens with empty eyes and an emptier soul while his own soul speaks of the great
things he wants to do when he grows up, and he tells his son to go mow the lawn, and then, sitting alone, why, he
wonders, why should I be crying?
Or: The man who, in adolescence, had been desperately lonely. He had found no one whom he could like or
admire, no one to whom he could talk. The one girl he cared for had deserted him for another boy. He came to
believe that his loneliness was a weakness; that the pain of his frustrated longing for a person he could value was a
flaw which he must conquer in himself; that a truly strong, independent man could have no such longing. He
became progressively more repressed emotionally. His public manner became more remote and more cheerful.
Now, at the age of thirty, he meets a woman with whom he falls desperately in love. But a subconscious block
forbids him to know how much he loves her: to know it would unlock the pain of his past and expose him to new
pain, should his love not be reciprocated. Since his repression seals off the knowledge of her meaning to him, he
cannot communicate it to her. He sees her frequently, but assumes a manner of detached, amused affection: he feels
that this manner expresses strength. At first, she responds to him. But eventually she with-