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A person can suppress the impulse to "choke the life out of some idiot who desperately needs it" for higher reasons, such as sociability, or more mundane reasons, like keeping a job - especially if it's a co-worker or boss being considered for the assault. The desire remains conscious, but is thwarted by the exercise of willpower due to a rational decision to avoid the action.
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 traumaTrauma|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).
Normal repression is sometimes considered to have two stages, which are progressively involved in the creation of the individual's sense of "self" and "other", of "good" and "bad", and of the aspects of personality called "ego" and "superego".
