Return of the Repressed

Freud's insistence that the repressed always returns is more a statement of faith than an evidence-based assertion. But it is a good faith. It says: nothing stays secret for ever, you cannot bury anything permanently, your true nature will eventually emerge, that affair you had will eventually come to light, those memories you are distracting yourself from don't go away just because you are distracting yourself from them. This is a worthwhile ethos by which to live life. It is not true, though. Memories, it seems, are not only sometimes lost, the default position for memories is to lose them, or rather it is to overwrite the memories with simplified neural tags or thumbnail versions of the memory. We do this to stop our minds exploding, but it means that it is not repressed memory that always returns, but repressed desire (the desire that shaped the recasting of the memory in the first place). That sounds truer; short of neural-surgical intervention, repressed desire always does return ... it just doesn't necessarily return at the same strength.