"Have You Ever Managed Without a Juicy Rationalization?" — Repress to Live

Summary: When we see news of children killed in Gaza or hear of young soldiers' deaths, the brain mobilizes mechanisms of repression and rationalization so it doesn't collapse. What happens when those temporary defenses become a fixed pattern of the national psyche?

In the film "The Big Chill," Jeff Goldblum explains to Glenn Close that rationalization is far more important than sex, reasoning: "Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?" As Israelis, we can add rationalization and repression as two national sports alongside it. God knows we can go without sex for a lot longer than we can go without these two cognitive maneuvers.

What Goldblum's character went through in a week, we go through several times a day, from the moment we wake up in the morning. So what exactly is happening under our hood when we keep pushing aside the sea of death we're drowning in?

Freud argued that a person can forget memories they'd rather not remember by pushing them into the unconscious — the way we shove an envelope with a bill we can't face to the very bottom of our bag — a process he called "repression." The idea has remained controversial for more than a century, partly because of the ethical and practical limits that made it hard to test experimentally in a controlled way. Even though researchers back then were far more permissive about experimenting on human subjects, the idea of frightening participants and then seeing whether they'd repress the event already seemed like bad taste at the time.

A sleeping beauty named repression

But in recent years, research evidence has been accumulating from psychology and neurobiology that offers a scientific basis for the process of conscious repression — the kind we perform when we see the faces of five twenty-year-olds who died. Or when we feel our hearts breaking, hear the distant crying of entire families, and picture the crying in the car, or the sad, lonely showers waiting for them in the world for years to come.

These studies show that the human brain has control and regulation mechanisms that let it block unwanted stimuli and divert attention — a poetic and precise phrase, if you think about it. These mechanisms are used for all sorts of things (the brain is economical and elegant, generally speaking), but also to keep unpleasant or painful memories from reaching awareness.

When a person is repeatedly exposed to triggers that stir up a memory or thought they'd rather push away, and they consistently mobilize effort to suppress awareness of that memory, the odds they'll remember it in the future go down. The more the attempt to avoid awareness repeats itself, the less accessible the memory becomes (experiments show that access stays blocked even when someone is offered an incentive to recall it accurately).

Picture the unwanted piece of information as Sleeping Beauty, and the effort to conceal her as planting wild, domineering climbing vines around the place where she sleeps, vines that need very little watering. At a certain point it becomes hard to find the way to the princess. Her disappearance isn't like the forgetting that comes from a momentary lapse of attention — like the moment I'm standing in front of the fridge with no idea what I meant to take out of it — it's an active suppression of the information itself.

The neurological basis for this process was revealed through real-time brain scans (fMRI), in which subjects were asked to try to suppress certain memories. The scans showed that during repression there's a rise in activity in the prefrontal cortex — the brain region responsible for self-control, planning and attention — while at the same time there's a drop in activity in the hippocampus, which is responsible for forming and retrieving memories. In other words, repression isn't a passive state of "natural forgetting" — it's an active act of blocking the recall process.

The prefrontal cortex includes several regions involved in this action, and without piling on complicated Latin names, these are regions involved in mental processes of motivation and emotion, coordination between perception and movement, visual attention, number comprehension and visuospatial working memory. And, of course, in high-level cognitive control, response inhibition and complex planning. The activity of these regions creates a deliberate suppression of hippocampal activity — making it harder for unwanted memories to rise into awareness, so that even if the sleeping beauty stirs on her side of the hedge and tries to carve herself a path through the dense vegetation, it won't be easy for her to find the way.

Snake, or popsicle wrapper?

Alongside memory, emotional response also gets regulated. Further studies have shown that when a person tries to regulate a difficult emotion — say, in response to a shocking image of a building destroyed by Iranian missiles, or a news headline about children the IDF killed in Gaza while they were waiting in line for food — there's a drop in activity in the brain region that processes fear, disgust or guilt. That drop only occurs when the prefrontal cortex is activated — that is, when a conscious effort is made to block the emotional response. Here too, this is an act of self-control — not a sense of numbness or indifference, but an active cognitive intervention whose purpose is simply not to collapse.

You can compare it to a process where, say, I'm walking down the street and see a shadow dart quickly past my foot. I jump, because my primitive brain thinks it might be a snake — but then my highly developed visual system identifies the details and sees it's just a popsicle wrapper someone left by the trash can, now blowing toward me in the wind. The prefrontal cortex sends the message that it's a false alarm, and I calm down. It turns out we can force ourselves through a similar process when we see terrible news, even though we know full well it is not, in any sense, a false alarm.

Further studies have shown that repeated repression doesn't just reduce emotional and memory activity in the present — it also impairs, in the long run, the ability to recall the repressed content. When a person repeatedly practices pushing certain content out of their awareness, it genuinely does become less accessible — at least temporarily. In other words: this thing we do (the reason we're not currently on a collective hunger strike sitting on the Ayalon highway) is an active, demanding, complex neurological operation, involving cooperation between the prefrontal cortex (control and regulation), the hippocampus (memory) and the amygdala (emotion).

Rationalization in the higher windows

If repression is the way we push threatening information away from awareness, then rationalization is the way we keep it in awareness — but in disguise. Repression demands considerable psychological resources, and maybe that's why, in many cases, we prefer the more economical solution: processing that same information until it becomes bearable, maybe even logical. It's not "I didn't know they wanted to build a concentration camp in Gaza," or "a cup of sugar costs 300 shekels in Gaza," or "Israeli soldiers are dying for nothing" — it's: "I know that's what's happening in Gaza," or "Of course it's painful, but look how many soldiers died — and there's a reason for it."

This mechanism operates mainly in the brain's "higher windows." The same region that, during repression, is busy blocking emotional responses, functions during rationalization more like an internal commentator: it gathers facts, spins them, coordinates between perception and emotion, and produces from them a more digestible story. We're not necessarily aware of the process while it's happening, but we can know it occurred when we hear ourselves or others say things like: "It's unpleasant, but there's no choice," "that's how it is everywhere," "they're just as much to blame," or "at least our side doesn't rape."

Research on rationalization isn't new (see: "The Big Chill," 43 years ago). Psychologists Herbert Kelman and Leon Festinger argued back in the 1950s that the brain can't hold a contradiction between values and behavior for long without finding a way to bridge it. Festinger called this "cognitive dissonance" — a concept that, to this day, is one of the first things taught in psychology, and probably for good reason.

It's the uncomfortable feeling created when there's a gap between what we believe and what we actually do or support. There are two ways to close that gap: change the behavior, or change the beliefs. Rationalization is the simpler of the two — change the story instead. Don't say "what's happening here is immoral," say "it's a complicated picture."

In terms of brain processes, rationalization involves cooperation between language regions (like Broca's area), decision-making regions, and semantic memory. That is, not the ordinary memory of what happened, but the memory of what we've learned to tell ourselves. When the brain produces a rationalization, it uses the tools of analysis, causal reasoning, linguistic patterns, and even empathy (strange, but logical if you think about it) — to build a narrative that lets us keep paying the car-inspection fee, take the kid to a movie, work out, make dinner, answer an email.

And that's exactly what Jeff Goldblum says in that film: you might manage without sex, but you can't survive without rationalization. You can't get up in the morning, watch the news, hear what happened in Gaza to us and to others, hear what our government of darkness is planning next, and keep functioning — without activating some inner mechanism that rearranges the facts, soothes the dissonance, and brings us back to equilibrium. In Israel in 2025, repression and rationalization are no longer just defense mechanisms — they've become the load-bearing structures of the national psyche.

Originally published in Haaretz on July 17, 2025.