1. The process of suppressing one's emotional responses to situations or memories as a way of protecting himself or herself from what had happened previously: Dr. Harrison, a child development specialist, was concerned about the depth of repression that she was seeing in her patient who had witnessed a terrible car crash in which the child's parents had been killed.
2. A condition in which political, social, or cultural freedom is restricted or controlled by force: The human rights activists were intent on bringing public attention to the repressions of the children in the tightly governed country.