Repression is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory, the mechanism that makes the unconscious possible. It is the process by which unacceptable thoughts, feelings, memories, and desires are expelled from consciousness and forced into the unconscious where they remain active but inaccessible to awareness. Repression is not forgetting in the ordinary sense. You do not simply fail to remember something. You actively, though unconsciously, prevent yourself from remembering because the material threatens to produce overwhelming anxiety, guilt, or pain. Freud distinguished between primal repression and repression proper. Primal repression is the original unconscious, the material that was never conscious and never...