If a person is said to have repressed an experience or a wish, then they are unable to recall it. The experience or wish has, in some sense, been forgotten. However, not all forgetting can be said to involve repression, although Freud sometimes considered that it might be. The person, who represses something, is suspected of having a motivation to forget. As such, repression has been said to comprise wilful or willed forgetting, although the willing may be said to occur unconsciously. The child, in the Oedipal situation, has an interest in forgetting shameful desires. In the light of the previous discussion of Little Hans, one might also say that the parents, too, have reasons for overlooking their own desires, and projecting them conveniently onto the child.

Yet, this leads back to the dilemma of repression. How can one intentionally forget something? The moment one concentrates on accomplishing the forgetting, one is surely remembering the very thing which is to be forgotten. As was shown in chapter 2, Freud attempted to resolve the dilemma by postulating an unconscious ego. This hidden ‘I’ supposedly goes about the business of repression, concealed from the awareness of the conscious ‘I’. Such a theoretical move, however, provides no real solution. Instead, it makes repression seem mysterious and unobservable.

The present approach seeks to avoid the problems of a hidden ‘I’, by linking repression to the use of language. The gain is at the expense of another problem.