The difference is just this.  When an ungratifiable desire is honestly faced and squarely answered, it is modified by other desires, chooses another way of discharge, and ceases to be desire.  When a desire is repressed, it is still desire, unsatisfied, insistent, unmodifiable by mature points of view, untouched by time, automatic, and capable of almost any subterfuge in order to get satisfaction.  A repressed desire is buried, shut away from the disintegrating effects of sunlight and air.  While the rest of the personality is constantly changing under the influence of new ideas, the buried complex lives on in its immaturity, absolutely untouched by time.

=Childish Birth-theories.= When a child’s questions about where babies come from are met by evasions, he is forced to manufacture his own theories.  His elders would laugh if they knew some of these theories, but they would not laugh if they knew how often the childish ideas, wide of the truth, furnish the material for future neuroses.  Frink tells the story of a young woman who had a compulsion for taking drugs.  Although not a drug-fiend in the usual sense, she was constantly impelled to take any kind of drug she could obtain.  It was finally revealed that during her childhood she had tried hard to discover how babies were made, and had at last concluded that they grew in the mother as a result of some medicine furnished by the doctor.  The idea had long been forgotten, only to reappear as a compulsion.  The natural desire for a child was strong in her, but was repressed as unholy in an unmarried woman.  The associated childish idea of drug-taking was not repellent to her moral sense and was used as a substitute for the real desire to bear a child.

Many of my patients have suffered from the effect of some such birth-theories.  One young girl, twenty years old, was greatly afflicted with myso-phobia, or the fear of contamination.  She spent most of her time in washing her hands and keeping her hands and clothing free from contamination by contact with innumerable harmless objects.  When cleaning her shoes on the grass, she would kneel so that the hem of her skirt would touch the grass, lest some dust should fly up under her clothes.  After eating luncheon in the park with a girl who had tuberculosis, she said that she was not afraid of tuberculosis in the lungs, but asked if something like tuberculosis might not get in and begin to grow somewhere else.  Her life was full to overflowing of such compulsive fears.

As opportunity offered itself from day to day, I would catch her compulsive ideas in the very act of expressing themselves, and would pin her down as to the association and the source of her fear, always taking care not to make suggestions or ask leading questions.  She was finally convinced out of her own mouth that her real fear was the idea of something getting into her body and growing there.  Then she told how she had questioned her mother about the reproductive life and had been put off with signs of embarrassment.  For a long time she had been afraid to walk or talk with a boy, because, not knowing how conception might occur, she feared grave consequences.