ABSTRACT
As early as 1908, Sigmund Freud had come to regard repression—the psychically damaging suppression of the sexual life—as too high a price to pay for civilization. Freud came to believe that free association could be a vehicle for redistributing libido, revising repression, advancing civilization. Repression, that defense against speech and cause of psychical symptoms, also seemed to be a principal tool for quelling inner conflict. The evolution of an idea of "compromise formation" in psychoanalysis is echoed by the historical evolution of free speech in America, which has also become about defining appropriate compromises. It is true that psychoanalysis might be called "dangerous" insofar as it champions individual desire and thereby runs athwart traditional social mores and inhibitions. Freud concluded that repression was actually somehow biologically inherited, perpetrated in a kind of collective unconscious, as a mechanism to protect us from the ultimate taboo: incest.
