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CLINICAL NOTES
Sigmund Freud (1915), ‘Repression,’ translated by James Strachey and edited by
Angela Richards, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin
Books, 1991), Vol. 11, The Penguin Freud Library, pp. 139-158
These clinical notes are an attempt to explain what exactly Sigmund Freud meant by
the term ‘repression’ in a paper that he wrote in 1915.
This paper on repression was translated and published in English in 1925 and is one
of the most important papers that he ever wrote in meta-psychology (i.e. the theory
of psychoanalysis).
The importance of this term relates to the fact that it is not only widely
misunderstood, but used commonly by those who are not aware of its technical
meaning in Freudian meta-psychology.
So, for instance, repression is usually thought to take the form of political repression
or sexual repression.
The term ‘political repression’ is used to refer to the denial of civil liberties in
totalitarian countries; ‘sexual repression’ is used to refer to the lack of sexual
freedom for young people in many parts of the world.
But this is not what Freud had in mind at all.
The term ‘repression’ is used in psychoanalysis to identify the specific causative
mechanism in the neuroses. Freud’s argument is not that repressions can be completely
avoided; it is rather the case that when repression is too severe it can lead to a
neurosis.
Freud is not preoccupied with political or sexual repression in the conventional
sense because countries with a lot of political and sexual freedom also have their
share of the neuroses.

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Invoking Freud’s work in the clinical sense then is about identifying the ‘sexual
aetiology of the neuroses’ and the causative mechanisms at work within a typology
of the psychoneuroses.
So there is a difference between using the term ‘repression’ in the literal sense in
psychoanalysis and ‘repression’ in the figurative sense by those seeking to further
the cause of human freedom and liberation.
What Freud meant by repression is simply this:
‘Repression is a preliminary stage of condemnation, something between flight and
condemnation; it is a concept which could not been formulated before the time of
psychoanalytic studies.’
These clinical notes then are an attempt to unpack these three lines.
The importance of doing this stems from the fact that a large number of patients go
into analysis with the fantasy that the analyst will give them permission to assume a
promiscuous approach to their sexuality by lifting all the repressions that are
preventing them from performing in bed.
Nothing could be further from the truth; this misunderstanding is known as ‘pan-
sexualism.’ It is based on the false assumption that if sexuality is the problem that
ails the human condition, then, getting more sex is the solution.
The concept of repression is related to Freud’s earlier work on ‘instincts and their
vicissitudes.’
When an instinct seeks libidinal expression, argues Freud, it may meet with some
form of resistance. In such cases the ideational representative of the instinct and the
affects attached to these undergo repression.
Why does this happen?
It happens because the subject cannot flee himself or his own instinctual
representatives. In such cases, he has to find a way of deflecting thoughts that he

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finds threatening or overwhelming out of the range of his conscious mind. He
therefore seeks recourse to repression.
The problem however is that in the attempt to deflect the thought from
consciousness the subject does too good a job of repressing it.
This leads to psychopathological consequences later in life. It might have been better,
Freud points out, if the subject had merely subjected the thought to ‘condemnation’
rather than repression.
But the subject chose repression because his childhood ego was not strong enough to
think-through and work-through the thought in the locus of condemnation.
Instead the thought (which is invariably of a sexual nature in the oedipal matrix) is
subject to a wholescale repression.
These oedipal thoughts however get retroactively activated during puberty or later on
when the subject has to make an object choice.
That is because the sexual fantasies of puberty and the modalities of object choice in
young adults are based on the libidinal prototypes of childhood.
As Freud explains in his papers on the psychology of love, the subject must seek
recourse to either the narcissistic or anaclitic model of love when he makes an object
choice.
In the former, the subject chooses an object that reminds him of himself; in the latter,
he chooses an object that reminds him of his parents.
The first model of object choice is called ‘narcissistic’ object choice; the second model
is called ‘anaclitic’ object choice.
In narcissism, the subject loves himself; his love is limited to the beloved being
willing to reflect his own love for himself.

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In the anaclitic form, the subject seeks in his beloved a form of attachment that he
had with a ‘mother who feeds’ and a ‘father who protects.’
When the subject is confronted with the existential task of making an object choice,
he finds that his ability to do so is affected by the unexpected ‘return of the
repressed.’
That is, the subject throws up symptoms which are libidinal ‘substitutes’ for the
repressed ideas and affects from the act of primal repression in childhood.
So while it may have been better for the subject to work-through his oedipal
fantasies (of marrying mummy or daddy when he grows up) using a model of
condemnation, this is something that the subject’s ego was not strong enough to do
when the fantasy was at its strongest in early childhood.
It is not uncommon to tease a child with an oedipal fantasy or for the child himself to
say that he plans to marry mummy or daddy later on.
A fully grown up adult may be able to laugh off such fantasies because he has the
psychic resources to work-through such a fantasy.
If these resources had been available to him when he was a little boy, it is less likely
that he would have had to contract a neurotic illness or seek recourse to severe forms
of repression to fend it off from his own consciousness.
Freud points out that not only is the little boy subject to ‘primal repression,’ but also
by ‘repression proper.’
What this means is that primal repression is not a one-off event. It requires an
endless expenditure of psychic effort to keep it in place.
The basic problem for neurotics is that they must endlessly spend their psychic
resources fending off oedipal fantasies even after they are fully grown up; this
affects their ability to find fulfilment in marriage or sublimate the repressed affects at
work.
All that they need is a significant encounter with a sexual object with a deep
resemblance to their parental figures in order to get disoriented and make mistakes;
this, simply put, is the neurotic predicament.
Those who have read the novels and stories of D. H. Lawrence, for instance, will
know that he spent an entire lifetime working through the oedipal politics of his
own childhood and family in his books.

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All the main characters in Lawrence’s texts invariably have difficulty in areas
pertaining to making and remaining constant in their object choices, marriage,
having and raising children, separating from their parents, etc.
Lawrence himself had to struggle endlessly with the Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’
represented by Freudian psychoanalysis.
In fact, the main bone of contention for Lawrence in his polemics against
psychoanalysis was the Freudian model of repression which he felt had made it
impossible for the subject to ‘individuate.’
Lawrence overlooks the rather obvious point that Freud was ‘describing’ the
mechanisms of repression and not prescribing repression as a way of life.
That is why I emphasize that Freud starts this paper on repression with the concept
of ‘condemnation’ as a better way for the ego to fend off ideational representatives
that are incompatible with the sexual norms of a given society or which transgress
on the incest taboo.
The Lawrentian text then is basically preoccupied in formulating an approach for the
protagonist to deal with the ‘return of the repressed’ in adult life.
It is precisely at the moment when the Lawrentian protagonist is convinced that he is
done with his mother, that he comes undone in his object choices and realizes that his
analysis (or the real-life equivalent of that) has barely begun.
The lack of closure in the plot of novels like Sons and Lovers then is indicative of the
existential demands that the oedipal predicament makes on characters like Paul
Morel.
It is worth noting that Paul’s problem is not reducible to a desire ‘for’ his mother in
the sexual sense, but more in coming to terms with the desire ‘of’ the mother.

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Compare this with Hamlet who not only suffers from a desire ‘for’ the mother, but
has to also shoulder the desire ‘of’ the father for revenge against Claudius (who
usurps the throne of Denmark).
That is why Hamlet can be found both in his mother’s bedroom urging her to stop
fornicating with Claudius and in the ramparts in quest of his father’s Ghost.
In the approach to the Oedipus complex that we associate with the ‘French Freud,’
the focus is on the desire of the maternal Other rather than a desire for the maternal
Other though it could well be the case that like Hamlet the subject is split between
what he desires of his mother and what his father desires of him.
This then is a way of conceiving of oedipal relations without taking a reductive
approach to the incest taboo. It is most commonly associated in France with the work
of the Lacanian analyst, Serge Leclaire.
What Paul is burdened by then is not only the fact that his father was subject to
humiliation in the oedipal matrix, but by his own inability to ‘embody the symbolic
phallus’ for his mother.
The Lawrentian text can then be defined as a way of coming to terms with the primal
repressions of the protagonists that have failed.
Paul’s inability to choose between the two women in his life, Miriam and Clara, and
be the Man that his father could never be in the gaze of his mother dramatizes
precisely the impossibility of Paul, or any other son, being able to embody the
symbolic phallus.
The oedipal matrix is the staging ground then for primal repression, repression
proper, and the return of the repressed.

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It does not therefore make much sense to read Freud’s paper on repression in
isolation; that is why I have invoked the oedipal plots of D.H. Lawrence to provide a
literary context in which readers can work-through their own repressions.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN