Freud as having said that one gets sick because of repression, and, ergo, they deduce that the best way to remain healthy is never
to repress. Now only a complete fool could believe or say such a thing. No one—not even an animal—can do just what he
pleases; and certainly Freud and his school never advocated such nonsense.^3This leads us to the second major error that prompts men to repress:
- Many people believe that if one feels an emotion or desire, one will and must act on it.
This premise is implicit in the above quotation from Brill. Note the alternative he sets up: either a man represses
certain desires, i.e., makes himself unconscious of them—or else he does "just what he pleases," i.e., surrenders to
any impulse he happens to experience. This is absurd.
A rational man neither represses his feelings nor acts on them blindly. One of the strongest protections against
repression is a man's conviction that he will not act on an emotion merely because he feels it; this allows him to
identify his emotions calmly and to determine their justifiability without fear or guilt.
It is an interesting paradox that repression and emotional self-indulgence are often two sides of the same coin. The
man who is afraid of his emotions and represses them, sentences himself to be pushed by subconscious
motivation—which means, to be ruled by feelings whose existence he dares not identify. And the man who
indulges his emotions blindly, has the best reason to be afraid of them—and, at least to some extent, is driven to
repress out of self-preservation.
If, then, a man is to avoid repression, he must be prepared to face any thought and any emotion, and to consider
them rationally, secure in the conviction that he will not act without knowing what he is doing and why.
Ignorance is not bliss, not in any area of man's life, and certainly not with regard to the contents of his own mind.
Repressed material does not cease to exist; it is merely driven underground, to affect a man in ways he does not
know, causing reactions he is helpless to account for, and, sometimes, exploding into neurotic symptoms.
There are occasions in man's life when it is necessary for him to suppress thoughts and feelings. But suppression
and repression are different processes. Suppression is a conscious, deliberate,