I'm tempted to write a TL;DR post outlining my thoughts on this much further but I don't have the energy right now so I'll just leave two related points
1) What because I'm getting at more than whether 'repression' is unhealthy is whether repression is possible at all. The whole idea comes from early twentienth century psychology and psychoanalysis with its metaphors stuck in the notion of machines and energies and forces (as opposed to now where the metaphor is computational... Is repression 'hard wired'?). The way I see it is that if repression exists, it must be as 'natural' as the sexuality it counters. Or put it another way, how is it possible to have an unnatural thought? All thoughts, assuming materialism to be true (and I think it must be), are products of the brain. The brain is an organ of the body with an evolutionary history. Therefore all thoughts are products of nature. Therefore unnatural thought is an oxymoron. Therefore repression - whatever it is - is natural. All human behaviour is natural (thus to claim there is a human nature is a
misrepresentation of statistics)
Usually the way of explaining this therefore is to invoke culture. So that the cultural environment creates these ideas which somehow contradict with our 'natural' desires (Ah, so you are an
externalist). But this, again, is a metaphor of layers, that there is a cultural layer on top of the 'you' layer and these struggle with each other. Now this may be true, but I want evidence dammit. Besides with my training in Anthropology has led me to doubt a lot whether you can abstract a person from their culture or environment as if we exist in some way separate from these things.
Before anyone complains and say I'm damaging the reputation of humankind or of homosexuals or whatever, I suggest you look
here2) Back as a second year undergrad I did a seminar on Nationalism and in my class I had to read a paper by (and here goes my pretense at scientificity) Slavoj Zizek. In the paper using the usual Lacanian pseudo-intellectual gymnastics Zizek argued, in his oh so Contrarian way that nationalism was a positive and revolutionary force as it way in which communities organized their enjoyment. Now, there is a lot of rubbish here and I'm not interested in claiming any empirical reality for Lacan or for Zizek (as none exists), but the idea has long struck me as not totally unsound. That the things a certain people do and believe and think has a meaning within their own semiotic frame of reference and for such people such actions make sense and are true
as long as that frame of reference holds within that community and for each individual. We all have differing perceptions to which we attach labels and therefore significance (or insignificance) and we can not be certain how well those labels apply even to ourselves given the limitations of introspection, thus how can we be certain of the experiences of other peoples?
