It is for this reason that Freud and his followers, who have worked most deeply on the human mind, see it as their first task to restore the lost memories of childhood to their psychiatric patients. All psychoanalysis is the process of going back to the childhood memory. “Whatever your illness today,” they say, “its root cause lies hidden in your childhood, and the illness cannot disappear until the cause is uprooted.” All that we have repressed during our childhood will follow us like a shadow throughout our life, influencing our personality and coloring all our actions. You may go mad when you are sixty; but the seed of your madness might be lying in those first four years. Over the years that seed has become a tree, but its roots are in the childhood. If we dig down to those roots and cut them away the whole tree will die. Hence the preoccupation of psychoanalysis with childhood.
The unconscious is created out of repression. Repression is the child of non-acceptance. Your impulses are lying hidden in your unconscious. Everything that is suppressed is very powerful. Society has labeled it bad because it is powerful. Society is afraid that, if it is not repressed, it is so powerful that it will shatter society to pieces, it will destroy it.
The most powerful of all is sex; hence it is sex which society is most opposed to. Society seeks the total suppression of sex, because as soon as one’s sexual feelings are repressed the person becomes a slave to the society. Look at a bullock and compare it with a bull. The bullock has been castrated, the bull’s sexuality is intact. These two animals seem not to belong to the same species. The dignity, the grace, the power of a bull gives it a very different quality compared to the bullock. The bullock is lifeless, without passion – but if we want to harness an animal to a cart only a bullock will do; the bull is so powerful that his strength will make it impossible to control him. It is difficult to say where he will go. He will take the cart wherever he wants – into ditches and hedges, into ups and downs – which the cart will never survive. It is not so with the weak, domesticated bullock.
Every child is born a bull; and society converts every child to a domesticated ox, because only then can his power be harnessed and yoked; only then can he be used. It is because we have converted the wild to the domesticated that life lacks interest, magnificence and grace; and we have been doing it for such a long time that we no longer know – we have no idea – what we are doing.
Society is afraid of what the new generation will do if every child is left completely free in sexual affairs. Will they still carry the burden of society? The fear is that they will not. Will they still be prepared to become school teachers? The fear is that they will not.. Will they still work as clerks, sitting in offices all their lives? The fear is that they will not. Ultimately, will the institution of the family be able to survive strong, liberated sexual passion? The husband will be afraid: is the wife going to care for him? One feels fear with the idea of this much energy. Everything will be thrown into chaos, and anarchy will be the result.
Society’s fear of energy runs very deep; hence the necessity to weaken the child. But the weakness is only superficial, just like the embers in a fire which stay alive and glowing from the inside, spreading their heat to the ashes. The topmost layer of your personality has become just like ashes. This is why you are so miserable and lusterless, smothered, because no one can be blissful and joyful without energy.
The experience of pure energy is bliss.