The classical conception of repression as a dynamic banishing from consciousness of ego-dystonic impulses is examined. Fear, anxiety, and guilt all produce psychic pain. The preoedipal child is exposed to a very considerable variety of fear-provoking experiences, but is incapable of guilt. Many fears become entrenched by conditioning. The child lacks the adult's ability to remove himself from or to overcome the source of fear, or to ignore some stimuli which are only apparently dangerous. Preoedipal repression is therefore viewed as a necessary means of augmenting the forgetting mechanism, in order to protect the child from the innumerable fear-provoking experiences of early childhood. Without such a protective mechanism, the young child's ego would have great difficulty in surviving the bombardment of experiences that beget conditioned fear.