THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED and the PUTATIVE TRIUMPH OF SIN

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED and the PUTATIVE TRIUMPH OF SIN

As an example of the struggle by obsessional people to prevent their secret and sinful ideas – i.e. ideas that had been repressed [rendered unconscious] from becoming conscious again, Freud drew our attention to the nature of repression by inter alia referring to Felicien Rops's notorious painting, called "Eros" that allegedly shows us the triumph of sin.


Readers who are familiar with psychoanalysis will be aware of the concept known as "the return of the repressed." Obsessional neurotics are often engaged in a debilitating struggle to prevent the repressed material from becoming conscious again. The struggle is usually futile, and Freud quoted a relevant homily by Horace that says, "Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret – You may drive out nature with a  pitchfork, but she will always return." It cannot be helped, Freud says, "What is repressed will usually prove to be the victor."


He adds that the painting (cropped here by me to make it appear less offensive) "illustrates a typical case of repression in the life of saints and penitents. An ascetic monk has fled, no doubt from the temptations of the world, to the image of the crucified Saviour. And now the cross sinks down to a shadow, and in its place, radiant, there rises instead the image of a voluptuous, naked woman, in the same crucified attitude. Rops has placed Sin in the very place of the Saviour on the Cross."

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Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva, SE Vol. IX: 35.

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