The return of the repressed

The return of the repressed is the idea that emotions or thoughts that are not socially acceptable are repressed into the unconscious and eventually rise as symptoms or when they have the socially acceptable moment to come out. People, Freud says, are primal beings at heart and still have the urges to kill anyone that annoys us or rape someone but we suppress these urges due to the nature of society. These feelings cannot be fully destroyed however and are only repressed leaving traces of these urges in our behavior. An example of this would be the idea of people watching so called 'torture porn' films and enjoying them due to their repressed desire to kill.