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Repression Quotes

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Repression Quotes

“It is illegitimate to conclude from the prohibition anything regarding the nature of what is prohibited; for the prohibition proceeds by dishonouring the guilty, that is to say, by inducing a disfigured or displaced image of the thing that is really prohibited or desired. Indeed, this is how social repression prolongs itself by means of psychic repression without which it would have no grip on desire.”

DesireSocialGuiltRepressionProhibitionPsychic
Author:Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
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“The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus. The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities." Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perception of basic orgonotic functioning by means of rigid armoring; in the schizophrenic, on the other hand, the armoring practically breaks down and thus the biosystem is flooded with deep experiences from the biophysical core with which it cannot cope." The "deep experiences" to which Reich refers are the pleasurable streaming sensations associated with intense excitation that is mainly sexual in nature. The schizophrenic cannot cope with these sensations because his body is too contracted to tolerate the charge. Unable to "block" the excitation or reduce it as a neurotic can, and unable to "stand" the charge, the schizophrenic is literally "driven crazy." But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, "homo normalis," having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being "well adjusted," he sees the alternative as "crazy." And in a sense he is right. Without going "crazy," without becoming "mad," so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.”

LifeFearEmotionLivingGuiltSexualityTherapyRepressionNeurosisBioenergetics
Book:Fear Of Life
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“We may try to numb anger, but when we do we numb joy and pleasure on the world too. This numbing does not mean we stop having the feelings, it just stops us from being aware that we are having them. Those feelings are still churning away, tensing our bodies, writing unconscious scripts for us, storing up stuff to unload on to the world, on to our kids, but preferably on to our therapists. This numbness also inhibits the ability to have good relationships as well.”

EmotionAngerRepressionSuppression
Book:The Descent of Man
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“Equally essential is a nourishing emotional connection, in particular the quality of attunement. Attunement, a process in which the parent is "tuned in" to the child's emotional needs, is a subtle process. It is deeply instinctive but easily subverted when the parent is stressed or distracted emotionally, financially or for any other reason. Attunement may also be absent if the parent never received it in his or her childhood. Strong attachment and love exist in many parent-child relationships but without attunement. Children in non-attuned relationships, may feel loved but on a deeper level do not experience themselves as being appreciated for who they really are. They learn to present only their "acceptable" side to the parent, repressing emotional responses the parent rejects and learning to reject themselves for even having such responses”

EmotionPsychologyAttachmentRepression
Book:When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
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“It is not only negative feelings that become blocked. The repression extends to more and more of his emotional capacity.When one is given an anesthetic in preparation for surgery, it is not merely the capacity to experience pain that is suspended; the capacity to experience pleasure goes also - because what is blocked is the capacity to experience *feeling*. The same principle applies to the repression of emotions." Chapter 1: Discovering the Unknown Self, pg. 9, Bantam Edition, 1984”

EmotionPsychologyRepression
Author:Nathaniel Branden
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“[Patricia Highsmith] had experienced at first hand many of Ripley's characteristics - splintered identity, insecurity, inferiority, obsession with an object of adoration, and the violence that springs from repression. Like her young anti-hero, she knew that in order to survive, it was necessary to prop oneself up with a psychological fantasy of one's own making. 'Happiness, for me, is a matter of imagination,' she wrote in her notebook while writing The Talented Mr. Ripley. 'Existence is a matter of unconscious elimination of negative and pessimistic thinking. I mean, to survive at all. And this applies to everyone. We are all suicides under the skin, and under the surface of our lives.”

WritingHappinessImaginationExistenceFantasyViolenceIdentitySurvivalNegativeSuicideSurfaceObsessionUnconsciousInsecurityPessimismAdorationRepressionInferiorityPessimisticSurviveAnti HeroSplintered Identity
Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
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“На поминках по моему отцу за одним столом в первый и последний раз встретились две ветви моей семьи — дед по матери, уроженец юга Украины и выпускник техникума, сталинист, ветеран Финской и Великой Отечественной, и двоюродная бабушка по отцу, яркий представитель московской еврейской интеллигенции, доктор наук, муж которой чудом не попал в лагерь. В какой-то момент речь зашла о репрессиях — семья отца была репрессирована, его отец погиб в лагере, а сам он провел несколько лет в ссылке. И произошла удивительная вещь. Оказалось, что эти два человека прожили свои жизни в разных странах, никак не пересекавшихся друг с другом. Дед, по его словам, не знал о репрессиях, их, скорее всего, и не было. А в той стране, где жила бабушка, все всё знали с 20-х годов, и аресты и лагеря были, в общем, главной реальностью, в которой существовали она и ее круг. Тот разговор за столом со всей очевидностью продемонстрировал то, что абстрактно кажется невероятным. Объективной реальности прошлого не существует. Ее формирует память, а память необъективна. Но гораздо важнее, что такое неопределенное прошлое, в свою очередь, формирует настоящее. Замороженная и «непредсказуемая» история страны с двоящейся памятью оборачивается двоящейся реальностью в настоящем. Такая раздвоенность чревата, в лучшем случае, «просто» невозможностью двигаться вперед, в худшем — гражданской войной.”

PastImaginationFamilyMemoryUncertaintyRepressionObjectivityStalinismBifurcation
Author:Николай Эппле
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“It is pointless to ask: Why then is sex so secret? What is this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question it perhaps, but always in the context of and through its repression? In reality, this question, so often repeated nowadays, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if you can uncover it. [...] It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this injunction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the truth in sex?”

PhilosophyTruthSexRepressionThe History Of Sexuality
Author:Michel Foucault
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“The basis of depression is more often than not that we have placed the source of our happiness outside ourselves. This makes us automatically vulnerable to depression, anxiety, fear, and loss. To feel separated from anything deemed essential for our happiness is ultimately to feel shut off from Life. We must take back our power and refuse to be the helpless victim of some perceived loss or lack.”

HealingSadnessDepressionAnxietyWholenessRepressionHealing DepressionHealing Sadness
Book:The Love of Devotion
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“The mantra these days is “talk about your feelings.” It sounds like good advice and perhaps it is. It is said, though, by those who can already speak freely. For others, there are consequences to talking, to admitting to colleagues, friends, family—many of whom are struggling too—that you are struggling. There are difficulties in even finding the words, and then in facing the distinct possibility of someone mumbling something awkward or dismissive in response, breaking eye contact. Words have a weight. Sometimes they are lead.”

SilenceRepression
Book:Inventory: A Memoir
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“There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father.”

FearChildhoodGuiltSexualityParenthoodRepressionSuppressionBioenergetics
Book:Fear Of Life
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“Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.”

LifeHellDestructionMadnessVengeanceRepression
Book:The Passion According to G.H.
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“Dissociation is the common response of children to repetitive, overwhelming trauma and holds the untenable knowledge out of awareness. The losses and the emotions engendered by the assaults on soul and body cannot, however be held indefinitely. In the absence of effective restorative experiences, the reactions to trauma will find expression. As the child gets older, he will turn the rage in upon himself or act it out on others, else it all will turn into madness.”

AbuseMadnessMental HealthMemoryTraumaChild AbusePtsdDissociative Identity DisorderRepressionDissociationAmnesiaChildhood TraumaRitual AbuseMemory LossPost Traumatic Stress DisorderDissociative AmnesiaDissociative DisordersPosttraumatic Stress DisorderRepressing Emotions
Book:Satan's High Priest
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“Entering a period of change is prime time for healing. We may find that seemingly random and unexplainable emotions start surfacing. We may get angry, afraid, or sad for no logical reason. It is not random, inexplicable, or illogical. If we follow the emotions, we will find that they are directly related to some memory or issue which wishes to surface and heal. It may be in the past, but the past has formed our present life experience.”

LifeChangeHealingConsciousnessEmotionsMemoryThoughtCyclesRepressionPsyche
Book:Love's Longing
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“Since the eighteenth century, clerical and military critics of liberalism have pictured it as a doctrine that achieves its public goods, peace, prosperity, and security by encouraging private vice. Selfishness in all its possible forms is said to be its essence, purpose, and outcome. This, it is said now and then, is inevitable once martial virtue and the discipline imposed by God are discarded. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. The very refusal to use public coercion to impose creedal unanimity and uniform standards of behavior demands an enormous degree of self-control. Tolerance consistently applied is more difficult and morally more demanding than repression. Moreover, the liberalism of fear, which makes cruelty the first vice, quite rightly recognizes that fear reduces us to mere reactive units of sensation and that this does impose a public ethos on us. One begins with what is to be avoided, as Montaigne feared being afraid most of all. Courage is to be prized, since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats, both physical and moral. This is, to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. ... The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining, far too much so for those who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom.”

ReligionFreedomLibertyDiversityComplexityLiberalismRepressionOlerance
Book:Ordinary Vices
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“There is no great reward for being emotionally withdrawn, no pity prize for bottling your frustration. No one is coming to congratulate your chronic self-repression. By opening up, maybe you will inconvenience some people. Maybe you will trigger some conflict. Maybe you will be rejected, criticized, judged. Everything comes with a price and everything has its compensation. Authenticity may require pain, but it also opens the doors to joy, creativity, self-respect, empathy. Self-repression, on the other hand, costs you all the beauty of the world in exchange for a prison of comfort. Is it really worth it? Isn't it time to break free?”

FeelingsSelf LoveEmpathyEmotionsVulnerabilitySelf RespectRepressionSelf ExpressionRepressed EmotionsSelf Repression
Author:Vironika Tugaleva
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“I wasn’t empty because others abandoned me, but because I had abandoned myself. Who I am was repressed—collateral damage in a long-term coping mechanism gone unchecked. My subconscious had put up partitions to contain the flood of emotion in the wake of trauma, but in doing so, my identity was trapped and locked away as well. As a result, everything repressed would one day come forward—without warning, without control, and without a shutoff valve.”

GriefLonelinessDepressionTraumaDenialEmptinessPtsdRepressionWho Am I
Book:Drive Through the Night
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“Sergeant, Kindly has probably not lain with a woman since the night of his coming of age, and that time was probably with a whore his father or uncle bought for the occasion. Women can tell these things. The man's repressed, in all the worst ways.' 'Oh, and what are the good ways of being repressed?' 'For a man? Well, decorum for one, as in not taking advantage of your rank. Listen closely now, if you dare. All real acts of chivalry are forms of repressed behavior.”

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Book:Reaper's Gale
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“Today, in a world in which the very word ‘classical’ hints at something revered to the point of dullness, it is hard to understand quite how alarming many of these works were to the Christians. But to Christian eyes the classical canon had the power to horrify. It was replete with sins of every kind. Open Homer’s Iliad and you might find your eyes falling on a passage about how the god Ares seduced golden Aphrodite – and how they were both then caught in flagrante delicto. Open Oedipus the King and you might find a declaration that ‘the power of the gods is perishing’. Even works by the most stuffily august of authors were not without danger: open a work by the tediously virtuous Virgil, and you might find Dido and Aeneas up to no good in a cave in a rainstorm. Idolatry, blasphemy, lust, murder, vanity – every sin was there. That was what made them so enjoyable and, to the Christians, so damnable.”

SinChristianityRepressionMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Are you a kind of person who likes to keep all your emotions hidden from the people around you! Do you prefer restraining your feelings a little too much! In that case, you must know that too much emotional suppression can have catastrophic impact over your body.”

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Book:The Art of Neuroscience in Everything
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“First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who's next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end?' If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no murderously repressive regimes might remain.”

WarIraqIranAfghanistanForeign PolicySyriaNorth KoreaRepressionDespotismIraq WarAntiwar MovementInterventionismForeign Policy Of The UsWar In Afghanistan 2001 PresentAxis Of Evil
Book:A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
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“The Wilcoxes were not lacking in affection; they had it royally, but they did not know how to use it. It was the talent in the napkin, and, for a warm-hearted man, Charles had conveyed very little joy. As he watched his father shuffling up the road, he had a vague regret—a wish that something had been different somewhere—a wish (though he did not express it thus) that he had been taught to say 'I' in his youth.”

FamilyRegretAffectionRepressionRepressedHowards EndE M Forster
Book:Howards End
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