Organic Repression/The First Repressions

(Read this too)

"One may suppose that the founding of families was in some way connected with the period when the need for genital satisfaction, no longer appearing like an occasional guest who turns up suddenly and then vanishes without letting one hear anything of him for long intervals, had settled down with each man like a permanent lodger. When this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or rather, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who wanted not to be separated from her helpless young, in their interests, too, had to stay by the stronger male." Freud Civilization & Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud's general theory throughout Civilization and its Discontents is that society is the result of repression. The drives of the individual are incompatible with the needs of the group, and even when repressed do not go away. Society must provide channels for these instincts, but in a disguised way. Sublimation becomes the most productive defense against individual desire and aggression. This is familiar to us post-Victorians who see ourselves as liberated from such a society. But if repression does have an organic basis rather than just cultural, and it does, we shall not be rid of the need of such mechanisms.

What Freud thought was that there was a physiological as well as psychological reason for greater male-female attachment. This was the increasing dominance of the sense of sight over the other senses of sound and smell. In most mammals sound and smell are very strong, stronger than in humans. Primates, our mammalian relatives, rely more on sight than sound to navigate three dimensional arboreal environments. The change to bipedalism intensified the reliance on vision and diminished the importance of other senses.

The first repressions would emerge organically from this great transition to bipedal stature. Being on two legs meant that genitals are on full display. While of course it´s also true that among all animals genitals are visible, being hunched over on all fours obscures them more than upright gait, which is like permanently showing the underside. With continuous sexual receptivity, along with the dominance of vision, the sight of genitals created greater feelings of male jealousy

"The diminution in importance of olfactory stimuli seems itself, however, to be a consequence of man’’s erecting himself from the earth, of his adoption of an upright gait, which made his genitals, that before had been covered, visible and in need of protection and so evoked feelings of shame. Man’’s erect posture, therefore, would represent the beginning of the momentous process of cultural evolution. The chain of development would run from this onward, through the diminution in the importance of olfactory stimuli and the isolation of women at their periods, to a time when visual stimuli became paramount, the genitals became visible, further till sexual excitation became constant and the family was founded, and so to the threshold of human culture. This is only a theoretical speculation, but it is important enough to be worth checking carefully by the conditions obtaining among the animals closely allied to man."
Shame at the sight of genitals and a desire to limit sexual expression to facilitate social harmony is among the first social repressions. These facts of our upright posture, visible genitals, and continual receptivity are probably why the wearing of clothing became universal, besides aesthetic/cultural reasons. All of this is presupposed by the domination of the optical sense above the olfactory due to our primate past. The shame of being naked is not truly social however. We are still fine being nude in particular situations of privacy and intimacy. It is only in the presence of others we are not sexually intimate with that there is a sense of shame, the reaction is immediate and unconscious and sexual in nature. There is more to do with instinct and physiology than intersubjectivity.

An even greater and more general reason for repression resulting from the dominance of sight over smell and hearing would be from the very nature of the senses. It is much easier to avoid/block seeing something than it is to ignore smell or sounds. One can turn one's head, close one's eyes, or fixate on something else in the vicinity to avoid offending stimuli. But say loud music is harder to avoid. Even more contentious is foul odor. 

Freud connected the change from quadruped to biped to the anal stage of psychosexual development.

"the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive...The outcome, however, is not a release of libido but of an unpleasure, and eternal sensation analogous to disgust in the case of an object." Freud letter to Wilhelm Fliess 1897

We are much more comfortable saying today that one can look how they want than we are prepared to allow someone to smell how they want. The sight of an unkempt home with an overgrown lawn may depress housing prices for others, but it is only the external appearance that would have to be changed to solve this problem. Within a defined territory one is free to do they please, not in view. Various legal doctrines such as plain view make it clear that illicit behavior if visible is not protected.