1The action of subduing someone or something by force.

1. 1.1 The restraint, prevention, or inhibition of a feeling, quality, etc.
   the repression of anger can be positively harmful

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Julien uses museums, often founded on colonialist exploitation, as sites of oppression, repression and desire.
   • The denial of consensual interracial alliance - political or sexual - highlights the key role repression plays in establishing the social order of the post-Reconstruction South.
   • It ignores or abstracts away from the primordial forms of raw sensation: affect, excitation, stimulation and repression, pleasure and pain, shock and habit.
   • Suo's movie was, beyond sweet entertainment, a subtle look at Japanese work culture and the repression of desire.
   • What begins as a monologue with French-accented English from a mumbling - if endearing - simpleton emerges as a metaphor not only for language and cultural divides but sexual awakening and repression.
   • Throughout, both sexual motivations and repression dominate.
   • This reflects the presumed scenario of sexual repression or abuse which associates pleasure with control and isolates the victim in an impassive relationship to bodily function.
   • Bunuel took tales of heated love and thwarted desire and turned them into personal statements about obsession, repression, bourgeois propriety, Catholicism, and fetishism.
   • After Freud, no one can ignore the realm of the unconscious and repression, and Weinrich considers him as well.
   • This once-prestigious vocation has fallen on hard times, and for most now conjures little more than hierarchical abuse and sexual repression.
   • The two valences of withheld history and sexual repression intersect in the confession scene.
   • With a camera in hand, she was free to ask the impertinent questions that would emancipate society from its sexual repression.
   • Freudian analysis sees human behaviour being directed by repression of feelings from early childhood.
   • This lack may be projected onto their culture, particularly if the lack is due to a culturally driven repression.
   • Strong image is often reached by means of severe censoring and suppression; the clarity of image frequently contains hidden repression.
   • The extra layer of repression, though, becomes a gauze obscuring the emotional beats of the story.
   • Shakespeare's ambivalently comic treatment of power, sexuality, and repression belongs very much to the early years of the Jacobean period.
   • It is actually composed of emotional distance, politics, finance, and sexual repression.
   • The weakness in radical critiques of society and sex is that they fail to recognise that sex needs a ritual binding to control its demonism and secondly that society's repressions increase sexual pleasure.
   • If new studies of memory and the brain disprove Freud's fundamental hypotheses about the mechanism of repression, then Freud's theory of libido becomes less plausible, and psychoanalysis is undermined as a theory of art.

   Synonyms

   restraint, restraining, holding back, keeping back, biting back, suppression, keeping in check, control, keeping under control, stifling, smothering, bottling up

   inhibition, frustration
2. 1.2 The action or process of suppressing a thought or desire in oneself so that it remains unconscious.
   children and adults pay a heavy price for their deep repression of thoughts about death

   count noun an extraordinary panoply of sexual repressions and desires

   Example sentencesExamples

   • When his lawyer describes him as ‘the modern man’, we understand that his repression is shared by the film's society.
   • For example, during Reiko's struggle for sexual liberation, the mysterious stranger indeed helps knock down the walls of her repression and reawakens her own desires, which takes about half an hour of film time.
   • Struggling with rage, repression, and obsessive desire, she gradually allows herself to have a sexual relationship with the one person she adores - her sister.
   • He muses that this need to participate confuses some people into mistaking positive pro-action for repression.
   • His translators and mediators of colonial innocence are now dead so that Ben encounters two themes through which this innocence is challenged: withheld history and sexual repression.
   • Unfortunately, this young cast steers it further into caricature, playing the sexual repression and racism for light laughs.
   • There is an awkward squad in British art bred perhaps of northern Protestantism and the sexual repression, even perversion, that is seen by the rest of Europe as being so characteristically British.
   • In 1938 he was the subject of an offensive caricature in Samuel Beckett's Murphy, where his experiments with Gaelic prosody and his sexual repression are mocked in the figure of Austin Ticklepenny.
   • One can go further and suggest that this refusal to acknowledge and represent homosexual desire is another form of the writer's repression of the feminine within.
   • They had accepted all that world of sexual repression, had accepted its rules, the hypocrisy of the myth of female virginity and, needless to say, they had accepted authority.
   • Quentin's attempt to project an alternative ideal for Caddy is a form of repression, masking his unspoken desire for something he cannot have.
   • I haven't attended a circus since and can only surmise what sort of unspeakable terror I experienced that day, its memory locked deep within the vault of repression that sits just east of my heart.
   • The power of repression is almost palpable in her gestures and intonations.
   • As a young boy but not a child repression of sexual desire for the mother has occurred and latency should be present.
   • Particular focus has been on girls and women, for the reason that it is they who suffer most from cultural and religious oppression and repression.
   • Psychologically, the deep repression of sexuality that seems to have resulted from the repeated spankings administered to him as a child by his mother may have determined his morbid response to the abuse.
   • It is in the characters' repression of desire that emotion can be felt most.
   • Most surprising were reports about intellectual repression that students were experiencing.
   • There seemed to be a deep underlying repression in those teens which had no healthy outlet.
   • Here we see the furtive behavior of Tomik as a desperate need to connect, and even, given his repression, as an understandable misdirection of desire.