I first experience the conflict between the theatrical and the dramatic in the felt pressure to take up one of the roles prepared for me: eldest son, favorite daughter, heir to the family’s honor, avenger of its losses. Each of these roles comes, of course, with a script, one whose lines a person might easily spend a lifetime repeating, while intentionally forgetting, or repressing, the fact that it is but a learned script. Such a person “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something
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