A kind of sequel to the previous, shall we say "session", with ChatGPT.
Why did therapy culture clung to repression?
This is a very perceptive question, because the persistence of repression in therapy culture is not mainly about evidence — it’s about psychology, institutions, morality, and narrative. Several forces converged to keep the idea alive long after it should have faded.
I’ll lay them out clearly and without polemic.
1. Repression is a perfect moral narrative
Therapy culture is narrative-driven.
Repression offers:
• A hidden cause for present suffering
• A villain (abuser, system, patriarchy, family)
• An innocent victim
• A redemptive arc (recovery → healing)
This structure is extremely compelling.
It turns diffuse suffering into:
“Something bad happened to you, and it was not your fault.”
That is morally powerful — and often emotionally relieving — even if factually incorrect in specific cases.
2. It validates suffering without ambiguity
Many people suffer without:
• Clear trauma
• Clear causation
• Clear blame
Repression solves this discomfort.
Instead of:
• “I don’t know why I feel this way”
you get:
• “Something terrible happened, and I forgot it”
This is comforting in a paradoxical way.
Therapy culture prefers meaningful pain to meaningless pain.
3. It flatters therapeutic authority
Repression implies:
• The truth is hidden
• The therapist has special access
• Recovery requires expert guidance
This:
• Elevates therapist status
• Justifies long treatment
• Creates asymmetry of knowledge
Models based on:
• Coping
• Skills
• Acceptance
are less mystique-laden.
4. Freud’s shadow never fully lifted
Even after psychoanalysis declined scientifically:
• Its concepts remained culturally dominant
• Training programs retained psychodynamic language
• “Unconscious” explanations retained prestige
Repression survived as:
• A metaphor
• A folk theory
• A clinical intuition
Long after its evidential basis eroded.
5. The 1970s–90s cultural moment
The repression boom didn’t happen in a vacuum.
It coincided with:
• Feminist consciousness-raising
• Survivor movements
• Distrust of institutions
• Exposure of real, hidden abuse
Important point:
• Many real abuses had been denied or silenced
• The idea of repression resonated with this truth
Unfortunately:
• The model overgeneralized
• Suspicion replaced evidence
6. It aligns with a confessional model of healing
Modern Western therapy inherits a confessional structure:
• Healing comes from:
– Telling
– Naming
– Revealing
• Silence is pathology
• Disclosure is virtue
Repression fits this perfectly:
• What hurts must be spoken
• What is hidden must be exposed
But this is a cultural value, not a scientific fact.
7. It explains symptoms too neatly
Repression allows almost any symptom to be interpreted as trauma:
• Anxiety → abuse
• Sexual difficulty → abuse
• Depression → abuse
• Dissociation → abuse
This creates a closed explanatory loop:
• Symptoms prove repression
• Repression explains symptoms
Closed loops are psychologically attractive — and scientifically dangerous.
8. Therapists are human (and morally motivated)
Most therapists who promoted repression were not cynical.
They were:
• Trying to help
• Deeply empathetic
• Influenced by moving narratives
• Often themselves shaped by trauma discourse
Believing repression:
• Allowed them to stand unequivocally with the client
• Avoid skepticism that felt morally cruel
But moral alignment is not the same as epistemic rigor.
9. Institutions lag behind evidence
Even after the recovered-memory crisis:
• Training curricula changed slowly
• Popular psychology lagged decades
• Media narratives fossilized earlier ideas
Once embedded, ideas persist by inertia.
10. Why the idea is still attractive today
Even now, repression persists because it:
• Offers certainty where there is ambiguity
• Converts suffering into story
• Externalizes blame
• Elevates therapeutic insight
• Feels compassionate
But compassion and truth are not always the same thing.
11. The deeper reason (philosophical)
At a deeper level, repression appeals because:
We want suffering to have a cause we can uncover, rather than a condition we must learn to live with.
Repression promises:
• Knowledge instead of acceptance
• Explanation instead of endurance
• Discovery instead of uncertainty
That promise is hard to give up.
12. One-sentence takeaway
Therapy culture clung to repression because it is narratively satisfying, morally validating, institutionally empowering, and culturally resonant — not because it was empirically solid.
If you want next, we could:
• Compare repression with modern trauma therapies
• Look at predictive processing and memory
• Examine parallels with religious confession
• Or analyze how this connects to modern identity formation
Just tell me where to go next.
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