Sonny's A2 Media Blog

Return of the repressed

The return of the repressed is the process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious. tend to reappear, in consciousness or behaviour in terms of secondary and more or less unrecognisable derivatives of the unconscious, parapaxes, bungled or symptomatic actions, and examples or such derivatives.

Beginning with the interpretation of dreams. Freud always emphasized the indestructible nature of unconscious material as likewise the irreducible character of memory traces. If we have no memories of events during the firsts years of life this is because of the repression that affects them. In a sense, all memories may be said to be retained, their recollection depending solely on the way in which they are cathected, decathected or anticathected.

In the thirty-first of his New Introductory Lectures, the dissection of the psychical personality, Freud posited the unalterability of the repressed in the following terms impressions, which have been sunk into the id of repression, are virtually immortal after the passage of decades they behaves as though they had just occurred. In Moses and Monotheism, he added "what is forgotten is not extinguished but only repressed it's memory-traces are present in all their freshness, but isolated by 'antichathexes' they are unconscious inaccessible and consciousness."

Freud thought we all have to repress some of our most primitive desires and emotions in order to take our place in society. So infant rages are repressed, we cannot recall our early childhood.
So Freud is saying that the sudden outburst of effectively memories from early ages has hit a psycological part of the monster and they have built up some rage and began to murder.