The return of the repressed

The return of the repressed is the process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness or in behavior, in the shape of secondary and more or less unrecognizable "derivatives of the unconscious".

The return of the repressed was considered by Freud to be a "specific" mechanism a view he reiterated in his paper on "Repression" where it is portrayed as a third distinct phase in the overall process of repression, following "primal repression" and "repression proper" or "after-pressure".

In a section of Moses and Monotheism dealing with the return of the repressed, Freud evokes the re-emergence of the "impressions" of early childhood and the instinctual demands that can erupt into the life of the subject, orientating his actions and subjecting him to constraining impulses. The instinct "renews its demand, and, since the path to normal satisfaction remains closed to it by what we may call the scar of repression, somewhere, at a weak spot, it opens another path for itself to what is known as a substitutive satisfaction, which comes to light as a symptom, without the acquiescence of the ego.... All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may justly be described as the 'return of the repressed.' Their distinguishing characteristic, however, is the far-reaching distortion to which the returning material has been subjected as compared with the original".

Understanding the return of the repress helps me to understand more about narrative structure of horror genre. For example, there are a lot of horror movies which have a similar storyline about something coming back on a particular day, someone has gone mad, etc. By researching this topic gives me more ideas about the genre and narrative of the genre.