has just been thrown out attempts to force his way back into the room, the
gentlemen who have executed my suggestion take their chairs to the door
and establish themselves there as a resistance, to keep up the repression.
Now, if you transfer both locations to the psyche, calling this consciousness,
and the outside the unconscious, you have a tolerably good illustration of the
process of repression.’ “
“I agree.”
“But the disturber of the peace insists on reentering, Sophie. At least,
that’s the way it is with repressed thoughts and urges. We live under the
constant pressure of repressed thoughts that are trying to fight their way up
from the unconscious. That’s why we often say or do things without intending
to. Unconscious reactions thus prompt our feelings and actions.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“Freud operates with several of these mechanisms. One is what he
called parapraxes—slips of the tongue or pen. In other words, we accidentally
say or do things that we once tried to repress. Freud gives the example of the
shop foreman who was to propose a toast to the boss. The trouble was that
this boss was terribly unpopular. In plain words, he was what one might call a
swine.”
“Yes?”
“The foreman stood up, raised his glass, and said ‘Here’s to the swine!’ “
“I’m speechless!”
“So was the foreman. He had actually only said what he really meant.
But he didn’t mean to say it. Do you want to hear another example?”
“Yes, please.”
“A bishop was coming to tea with the local minister, who had a large
family of nice well-behaved little daughters. This bishop happened to have an
unusually big nose. The little girls were duly instructed that on no account
were they to refer to the bishop’s nose, since children often blurt out
spontaneous remarks about people because their repressive mechanism is
not yet developed. The bishop arrived, and the delightful daughters strained
themselves to the utmost not to comment on his nose. They tried to not even
look at it and to forget about it. But they were thinking about it the whole time.
And then one of them was asked to pass the sugar around. She looked at the
distinguished bishop and said, ‘Do you take sugar in your nose?’ “
“How awful!”
“Another thing we can do is to rationalize. That means that we do not
give the real reason for what we are doing either to ourselves or to other
people because the real reason is unacceptable.”
“Like what?”
“I could hypnotize you to open a window. While you are under hypnosis I
tell you that when I begin to drum my fingers on the table you will get up and
open the window. I drum on the table—and you open the window. Afterward I
ask you why you opened the window and you might say you did it because it
was too hot. But that is not the real reason. You are reluctant to admit to
yourself that you did something under my hypnotic orders. So you rationalize.”
“Yes, I see.”
“We all encounter that sort of thing practically every day.”
“This four-year-old cousin of mine, I don’t think he has a lot of
playmates, so he’s always happy when I visit. One day I told him I had to