Concept
Denial
Refusing to acknowledge an aspect of external reality or of one’s own experience.
Read more- Broader concept
- Defense
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 3
- Related
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1923 Freud gave disavowal (Verleugnung) its specific sense from 1923, when he described how children faced with the absence of a penis in girls deny the lack and believe they see one all the same; in his later writings on fetishism and splitting of the ego it becomes a defence against a perception of reality.
developed by
- Melanie Klein 1952 Counts denial, with splitting, omnipotence and idealization, among the processes that prevail in the first months of life, the paranoid-schizoid position, and traces the transference back to these earliest processes.
diverges from
- Repression 1971 Kohut sets the vertical split maintained by disavowal, in which incompatible attitudes coexist in consciousness, against the horizontal split of repression, which keeps the material unconscious.
- Negation 1971 Kohut distinguishes the vertical split of disavowal from the horizontal splits produced at a deeper level by repression and at a higher level by negation, in Freud’s 1925 sense.