Part One: The Middle Pillar - iPage

The Two Pillars offhe Temple 19
these resistance and repression is broken down and fear eliminated
from the sphere of consciousness.
Here, some word should be said about repression26 and the
means of its elimination. A great many people have come to
believe, through a very casual reading of some of the early psycho-
analytic literature, that psychology countenances the removal of
repression by means which are unethical and antisocial. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Repression is always defined as an
unconscious and automatic process. It is a process by which the
personality protects itself against distasteful concepts, by thrusting
them without the horizon of consciousness into the dark and for-
bidding region of the unconscious. Since this process begins very
early in life, the unconscious is by middle age stuffed with a mass
of repressed material ideas about parents and relatives, associa-
tions connected with environment, infantile beliefs and actions.
Suppression, on the other hand, is a deliberate and conscious thing.
It presupposses a process of conscious selection and elimination, in
whch one alternative is suppressed in favor of another.
It is repression, the unconscious process of thrusting things out
of sight, which is the dangerous method. It is dangerous because
repressed emotions and feelings lock up memory and power in the
unconscious. Because ideas become associated with each other,
forming definite complexes, there is, if repressed memories begin
to grow by association, a splitting off of one side of the mind at the
expense of the other with a consequent locking up of energy and
vitality which should be available for the entire personality. The
conquest of repression proceeds as with the conquest of internal
conflict previously described.
There is no need to live an anti-social or vicious life, one of self-
indulgence or of degradation as so many people think. To be free
from a repression does not argue that one should have behaved
like "a young man about town." Though that is not to say that a
reasonable satisfaction of the instinctual life should be eschewed
where this is at all possible. But the frank realization and accep-
tance of the human personality as many-sided, and a refusal to
blind oneself to experience no matter of what kind, will go far