—This has nothing to with the subject at hand, really. People not bringing it up doesn’t constitute repression.—
We’re both mincing words. I’ve discovered a couple of “shocking events” from my past that I was “repressing”. When someone asked about them though, I remembered them vividly. I may have been “actively” or “subconsciously” repressing them, but the fact is that they were significant, yet I never thought about them for decades.
Think about a highly skilled professional football player that represses the really bad game he had when he was in Jr High. He may subconciously avoid thinking about it. And he may be so successful that until he meets a guy at his 35th high school reunion that brings it up, he had forgotten all about it. He did do a form of memory repression. Especially since most of us would never forget such a thing and probably think about it every now and then, within the context of it being our career.
We’re talking about the business of human psycology. Words have “vague” meanings, and they like it that way.
“We’re both mincing words”
No. Maybe you are, but not me. Pyschiatrists may not be scientists, but they do attempt consistency in definition, and their “repression” means something definite. I’m using their term; you are borrowing it to describe something else.
“I’ve discovered a couple of ‘shocking events’ from my past that I was ‘repressing’”
No you haven’t.
“When someone asked about them though, I remembered them vividly”
Why use the term “repression,” then? All that means is that they were in your memory, like everything else you remember. If they had been scarring you all along, it’s because you did remember them, not because they were locked somewhere in you which we call “the unconscious.”
“the fact is that they were significant, yet I never thought about them for decades.”
So what? I’m sure you’ve gone stretches without thinking of insignificant things you remember, either. If you think those memories were hurting you all along while you weren’t remembering them, and that’s what made them “significant,” you’re wrong. Either they hurt you all along because you did remember them, or you didn’t remember them and they didn’t affect you in the interim, or they hurt you long before and you’re just pretending that in the meantime their impact has been persistent. There’s no fourth option, having to do with memories that stop being memories and hurt you all along, whatever they are, without you remembering them, until you do remember them later on. That is what classical psychology thinks, and classical psychology is wrong.
“He may subconciously avoid thinking about it.”
Avoiding thinking about something is not repression.
“He did do a form of memory repression”
No, that’s not repression.
“We’re talking about the business of human psycology. Words have ‘vague’ meanings, and they like it that way.”
If they do dilute the meaning of repression, it’s out of knowledge that it was a stupid concept to begin with, and bears no relation to reality. Things work this way a lot with Freud. He’s hailed as the messiah of the discipline, but if currently practicing psychiatrists ever went back to actually read more than a select few of his writings, they’d die of embarrassment.