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Literary notes about suppression (AI summary)

The word “suppression” in literature is employed in a remarkably diverse way, serving as a term for both concrete and abstract processes. In political and social writings, it often refers to the deliberate restraint or elimination of power, public dissent, or established orders, as seen in the critiques of aristocratic privileges and free speech ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]). In psychoanalytic and psychological contexts, it describes the mind’s method of restraining emotions, desires, and memories to prevent internal disturbances, a theme extensively explored by Freud and his followers ([7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]). At times, the term takes on a more literal, physical sense, as in descriptions of material or mechanical reduction ([13], [14]), while also appearing in the portrayal of personal and emotional experiences, such as in moments of repressed grief or unyielding inner conflict ([15], [16], [17]). Thus, "suppression" functions as a multi-layered concept that bridges the realms of politics, psychology, and everyday experience.
  1. He had sought this office with eagerness, under the idea of turning his whole forces to the suppression of the privileged orders of our community.
    — from The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  2. It is computed that over ten millions of dollars are annually expended in the United States for the suppression of crime.
    — from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I
  3. The peoples saw in it only the suppression of the religious and political despotisms and hierarchies under which they had so often suffered.
    — from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park
  4. It stands for the suppression of free speech and free thought and everything else!
    — from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
  5. I demand the suppression of the thesis.”
    — from The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet
  6. It is here given in a somewhat condensed form: BY THE KING: A PROCLAMATION FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF COFFEE HOUSES
    — from All About Coffee by William H. Ukers
  7. In the mechanism of hysteria suppression plays the chief part.
    — from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
  8. The suppressed wish, when suppression results in disturbances of the conscious life, has been called by psychoanalysts a complex .
    — from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park
  9. The first effects the suppression of libido and its transition to fear, which is joined to an external danger.
    — from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
  10. This transformation of emotion is by far the more important part of the suppression process.
    — from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
  11. The greatest suppression must leave room for distorted substitutions and their resulting reactions.
    — from Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud
  12. By avoiding a new suppression the estrangement between the ego and the libido comes to an end, the psychic unity of the personality is restored.
    — from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
  13. Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny classics, and they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops.
    — from The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories by H. G. Wells
  14. Diminution and suppression of the windage; straight grooves in the barrel, spiral grooves, rifled arms.
    — from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson
  15. Pierced deeper than I could endure, made now to feel what defied suppression, I cried— "My heart will break!"
    — from Villette by Charlotte Brontë
  16. But Mr. Wititterly’s feelings were beyond the power of suppression.
    — from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
  17. But she went out and had a hearty cry to make up for the suppression of her words.
    — from Middlemarch by George Eliot

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