Freuds "The retun of the Repressed"

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis and is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression. The word Repression is the name given to the action that is disallows yourself to access painful memories by burying them deep into your unconscious mind. He thought of the term "the return of the repressed", this lead to the ide of neurotic symptoms. He thought about the personality as having 3 difftent aspects. These aspects were Ego, the Superego and the Id. He thought that the mind was structurally similar to an ice burg. He used this to describe what happens when thoughts and feeling try to force its way to the mind, which will be expressed know as "ID" . The Ego, known as the 'referee', would stop this by repressing it and allowing it never to be shown or expressed.


Freud argued that the repression didn't happen within a persons consciousness, which lead him to believe that a person wasn'teven aware of the traumatic memories and experiences that have been repressed. However, there are signs that repression has taken through symptoms, fantasies, slips of the tongue and character traits

Some people watch horror because they can relate to them, but might not realizes this as it is repressed. In the horror film 'Halloween' a 'return of the repressed' narrative structure is used to show the audience the return of a psychotic killer that escapes from a mental instatute and decides to kill more people. In the movie it is made to seem that the memories of killing his sister returns when he kill the others.

Using this approach as a narrative structure to a horror film, the audience an insight to possible reasons as to why people who have repressed thoughts might do the things that they do.