138 Quotes About Repression

In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.

Individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common "enemy" on whom to act out their repressed rage. But as the inhabitants of this shrinking planet near the end of the twentieth century, the danger inherent in self-deception is growing exponentially- and we can afford it less than ever. Fortunately, at the same time, we now have the tools we need to truly understand ourselves, as we were and as we are.

As soon as it becomes impossible for states to attack and destroy one another, they turn almost automatically against their own peoples, their own territories; a sort of civil war or internecine conflict begins between the State and its natural referent. Is it not in fact the fate of every sign, every signifying and representative agency, to abolish its natural referent?

It was as if a lifetime's worth of emotional chutes and trapdoors installed for self-protection decades ago had malfunctioned in a spectacular way.

Freud's psychic apparatus is repressive apparatus with commandments and prohibitions that subjugate and repress. Like disciplinary society, the psychic apparatus sets up walls, thresholds, borders and guards. For this reason, Freudian psychoanalysis is only possible in repressive societies that found their organization on the negativity of prohibitions and commandments.

I knew that if I didn’t accept his invitation, I could never live as if I would have been willing to do something, should an opportunity have presented itself. I could never say to myself: If only I’d had the chance. This was, I knew, my chance.

All these dreams of helplessness, distress, of forking paths, of being locked up miles from anywhere, all these confused, indescribable episodes, are expressions of the fact that one is coming close to a secret zone, an impassable line - not at all, as the conventional interpretation has it, the bar of repression, but something more subtle of which we are the repressed.

Well, we can sing,” Olive explained. “But only in our hearts. We contribute through our silence.

My body’s a battlefield. Victory’s a void filled, a memory vanquished momentarily.