=Repressed Memories.= If we ask how so burning a memory could escape from the consciousness of a grown woman, we are driven to the conclusion that this forgetting can be the result of no mere quiet fading away, but that there must have been some active force at work which kept the memory from coming into awareness.  It was not lost.  It was not passive.  Out of sight was not out of mind.  There must have been a reason for its expulsion from the personal consciousness.  In fact, we find that there is a reason.  We find that whenever a vital emotional experience disappears from view, it is because it is too painful to be endured in consciousness.  Nor is it ever the pain of an impersonal experience or even the thought of what some one else has done to us that drives a memory out of mind.  As a matter of fact, we never expel a memory except when it bears directly on ourselves and on our own opinion of ourselves.  We can stand almost anything else, but we cannot stand an idea that does not fit in with our ideal for ourselves.  This is not the pious ideal that we should like to live up to and that we hope to attain some day, not the ideal that we think we ought to have—­like never speaking ill of others or never being selfish—­but the secret picture that each of us has, locked away within him, the specifications of ourselves reduced to their lowest terms, below which we cannot go.  Energized by the instinct of positive self-feeling, and organized with the moral sentiments which we have acquired from education and the ideals of society, especially those acquired in early childhood, this ideal of ourselves becomes incorporated into our conscience and is an absolute necessity for our happiness.

We have found that when two emotions clash, one drives out the other.  So in this case, the woman’s positive self-feeling of self-respect, combined with disgust, drove from the field that other emotion of the reproductive instinct which was trying to get expression.  Speaking technically, one repressed the other.  The woman said to herself, “No, I never could have had such a thought,” and promptly forgot it.  Needless to say, this kind of handling did not kill the impulse.  Buried in the depths of her soul, it continued to live like a live coal, until in later years, fanned by the wind of some new experience, it burst into flame.

In this case the wish had originally flashed into awareness for an instant, but very often the impulse never gets into consciousness at all.  The upper layers of the subconscious, where the acquired ideals live, automatically work to keep down any desires which are thought to be out of keeping with the person as he knows himself.  He then would emphatically deny that such desires had ever had any place in his life.

Freud has called this repressing force the psychic censor.  To get into consciousness, any idea from the subconscious must be able to pass this censor.  This force seems to be a combination of the self-regarding and herd-instincts, which dispute with the instinct for reproduction the right to “the common path” for expression.