Concept
Primal repression
In Freud's theory, the first, hypothetical phase of repression, in which a drive's psychical representative is refused entry into consciousness and so becomes fixated in the unconscious. It is maintained by countercathexis rather than by withdrawal of a conscious cathexis. Later repression, or after-pressure (Nachdrängen), acts on derivatives that the primally repressed attracts to itself. Freud described it in the Schreber case (1911) and in 'Repression' (1915), and in 1926 linked its occasions to excessive excitation that breaks through the protective shield. Rank traced it to the trauma of birth.
- Broader concept
- Repression
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 6
- Related
- Abjection
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1915 Freud named primal repression (Urverdrängung) in 'Repression' (1915) as a first phase in which a drive's psychical representative is denied entry into consciousness, an idea foreshadowed in the Schreber case (1911) as fixation. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety he returns to it as his own earlier concept, presupposed by later repressions.
reworked by
- Otto Rank 1924 Rank gives Freud's primal repression a concrete content: it is the anxiety of birth, the first psychic act, which bars the newborn's intense striving to return to the womb it has just left.
- Jean Laplanche 1987 Laplanche ties primal repression to the general theory of seduction. The child tries to translate the adult's enigmatic messages, and primal repression is the failure of that translation: what cannot be translated is left behind as the first unconscious contents.
developed by
- Sigmund Freud 1926 Freud had set out primal repression in 1915 as a first phase in which an instinctual representative is denied entry to consciousness. In 1926 he holds that most repressions met in treatment are after-pressure that presuppose earlier primal repressions, and suggests that quantitative factors, an overwhelming excitation that breaks through the protective shield, are what occasion them.