s toward authority, is very often kept from
free mature self-expression by a perpetuation of a childish reaction
against sex. We hardly need dwell longer on the folly of teaching
children to be ashamed of so inevitable a part of their own nature.
Disgust is a very strong emotion, and when it is turned against a part
of ourselves, united with that other strong impulse of self-regard and
incorporated into the conscience, it makes a Chinese wall of exclusion
against the baffled, misunderstood reproductive instinct, which is
thrust aside as alien.

=Restraint versus Denial.= Repression is not merely restraint. It is
restraint plus denial. To the clamoring instinct we say not merely,
"No, you _may_ not," but "No, you _are_ not. You do not exist. Nothing
like you could belong to me." The woman with nausea (Chapter V) did
not say to herself: "You are a normal, healthy woman, possessed of a
normal woman's desires. But wait a while until the proper time comes."
Controlled by an immature feeling of disgust, she had said: "I never
thought it. It cannot be."

The difference is just this. When an ungratifiable desire is honestly
faced and squarely answered, it is modified by other desires, chooses
another way of discharge, and ceases to be desire. When a desire is
repressed, it is still desire, unsatisfied, insistent, unmodifiable by
mature points of view, untouched by time, automatic, and capable of
almost any subterfuge in order to get satisfaction. A repressed desire
is buried, shut away from the disintegrating effects of sunlight and
air. While the rest of the personality is constantly changing under
the influence of new ideas, the buried complex lives on in its
immaturity, absolutely untouched by time.

=Childish Birth-theories.= When a child's questions about where babies
come from are met by evasions, he is forced to manufacture his own
theories. His elders would laugh if they knew some of these theories,
but they would not laugh if they knew how often the childish ideas,
wide of the truth, furnish the material for future neuroses. Frink
tells the story of a young woman who had a compulsion for taking
drugs. Although not a drug-fiend in the usual sense, she was
constantly impelled to take any kind of drug she could obtain. It was
finally revealed that during her childhood she had tried hard to
discover how babies were made, and had at last concluded that they
grew in the mother as a result of some medicine furnished by the