the latter is directly in his volitional control (Chapters Seven and Twelve).
A man may make errors, honestly or otherwise, that result in emotions he recognizes as wrong and undesirable; it
may be the case that some of these inappropriate emotions are the result of past errors or irrationality. But what
determines his moral stature in the present is the policy he adopts toward such emotions.
If he proceeds to defy his reasons and his conscious judgment and to follow his emotions blindly, acting on them
while knowing they are wrong, he will have good grounds to condemn himself. If, on the other hand, he refuses to
act on them and sincerely strives to understand and correct his underlying errors, then, in the present, he is
following the policy of a man of integrity, whatever his past mistakes.
If a man takes the content of his emotions as the criterion of his moral worth, repression is virtually inevitable. For
example, the Bible declares that a man's sexual desire for his neighbor's wife is the moral equivalent of his
committing adultery with her; if a man accepts such a doctrine, he would feel compelled to repress his desire, even
if he never intended to act on it.
All of the foregoing applies equally to the repression of "immoral" thoughts.
Freudian psychoanalysts teach that irrational and immoral desires are inherent in man's nature (i.e., contained in
man's alleged "id"), and that man cannot escape them; he can only repress them and sublimate them into "socially
acceptable" forms. The Freudians teach that repression is a necessity of life. Their secularized version of the
doctrine of Original Sin compels them to do so. Since they do not recognize that a man's emotions and desires are
the product of acquired (not innate) value-premises which, when necessary, can be altered and corrected—since
they regard certain immoral and destructive desires as inherent in human nature at birth—they can have no solution
to offer man except repression.
To quote from psychoanalyst A. A. Brill's Lectures on Psychoanalytic Psychiatry:
Please note that it is not repression, but the failure of it, which produces the (neurotic) symptom. People constantly misinterpret