Changes

Repression is considered unconscious and can often be detrimental. It may be contrasted with [[suppression]], which is entirely conscious and thus can be managed. Because repression is unconscious, it manifests itself through a symptom or series of symptoms, sometimes called the "return of the repressed." A repressed sexual desire, for example, might re-surface in the form of a nervous cough or a slip of the tongue. In this way, although the subject is not conscious of the desire and so cannot speak it out loud, the subject's body can still articulate the forbidden desire through the symptom.

In spite of the popularity and wide use of this concept in psychoanalysis and popular literature, this proposition of "motivated forgetting," where the motivation is (1) unconscious and (2) aversive, the process of repression has never been demonstrated in controlled research. It is often claimed that [[Psychological trauma|traumatic]] events are "repressed," yet it appears that it is more likely, not less, that the occurrence of these events is remembered, if in a distorted manner. One problem from an objective research point of view is that a "memory" is usually defined as what someone says or does, that can measured and recorded, since we have no way to verify the existence and/or accuracy of a memory except by the correspondence of what someone clearly expresses with some other representation of past events (written records, photographs; reports of others, etc).