=Repressed Memories.= If we ask how so burning a memory could escape
from the consciousness of a grown woman, we are driven to the
conclusion that this forgetting can be the result of no mere quiet
fading away, but that there must have been some active force at work
which kept the memory from coming into awareness. It was not lost. It
was not passive. Out of sight was not out of mind. There must have
been a reason for its expulsion from the personal consciousness. In
fact, we find that there is a reason. We find that whenever a vital
emotional experience disappears from view, it is because it is too
painful to be endured in consciousness. Nor is it ever the pain of an
impersonal experience or even the thought of what some one else has
done to us that drives a memory out of mind. As a matter of fact, we
never expel a memory except when it bears directly on ourselves and on
our own opinion of ourselves. We can stand almost anything else, but
we cannot stand an idea that does not fit in with our ideal for
ourselves. This is not the pious ideal that we should like to live up
to and that we hope to attain some day, not the ideal that we think we
ought to have--like never speaking ill of others or never being
selfish--but the secret picture that each of us has, locked away
within him, the specifications of ourselves reduced to their lowest
terms, below which we cannot go. Energized by the instinct of positive
self-feeling, and organized with the moral sentiments which we have
acquired from education and the ideals of society, especially those
acquired in early childhood, this ideal of ourselves becomes
incorporated into our conscience and is an absolute necessity for our
happiness.

We have found that when two emotions clash, one drives out the other.
So in this case, the woman's positive self-feeling of self-respect,
combined with disgust, drove from the field that other emotion of the