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.
Development
1915
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Repression (1915);Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926);Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911)
1924
reworked by Otto Rank
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.
In The Trauma of Birth (1924)
1926
developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926)
1987
reworked by Jean Laplanche
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.
In New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987)
Relations
- 1915 introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1924 reworked by Otto Rank
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.
- 1926 developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1987 reworked by Jean Laplanche
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.
- gave rise to Abjection
Kristeva ties abjection to Freud’s primal repression: the abject marks the subject’s first, precarious separation from the archaic mother, before the distinction of subject and object is secured.
Works
- 1911
Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)
Freud's study of the paranoia of Daniel Paul Schreber, a former presiding judge of the Saxon appeal court, written entirely from Schreber's published Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903); Freud never met him. He argues that, since paranoiacs say only what they choose to say, a printed self-account can stand in for personal acquaintance. The first part retells the case: a hypochondriacal illness in 1884–85 treated by the Leipzig psychiatrist Paul Flechsig, then, after a half-waking fantasy of how fine it would be to be a woman submitting to intercourse, a second illness from 1893 in which Schreber believed Flechsig, and later God, sought his "soul murder" and his transformation into a woman, until he accepted that transformation as the world order's demand, to be fertilised by divine rays and bear a new race. The second part interprets this: a surge of homosexual libido directed at Flechsig, standing for Schreber's brother and above all his father, the physician D. G. M. Schreber, was warded off by turning love into persecution; the replacement of Flechsig by God and the sun, both father figures, let the wish be accepted. The third part proposes the mechanism of paranoia: a fixation at the stage of narcissism, between autoerotism and object love; the derivation of persecution, erotomania, jealousy and megalomania as ways of contradicting the sentence "I (a man) love him (a man)"; repression in three phases; and the withdrawal of libido from the world, felt as its end, with the delusion as an attempt at recovery that rebuilds it. A postscript of 1912 reads Schreber's boast that he could gaze at the sun through the myth of the eagle that tests its young, and links neurosis to myth and totemism.
- 1915
The second of Freud's metapsychological papers of 1915, printed in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse. Repression is one of the vicissitudes a drive impulse may undergo when it meets resistance: since the ego cannot flee from itself as it can from an external stimulus, repression stands midway between flight and condemnation by judgement. It occurs when the unpleasure that satisfying a drive would cause elsewhere in the mind outweighs the pleasure it would bring. Its essence lies in turning something away from consciousness and keeping it at a distance, and it presupposes a sharp division between conscious and unconscious mental activity; before that division, reversal into the opposite and turning round upon the self do the work of defence. Freud separates primal repression, in which the drive's ideational representative is refused entry into consciousness and a fixation is established, from repression proper, an after-pressure that bears on the derivatives of the repressed and is helped by the attraction the primally repressed exerts. The repressed goes on living and proliferating in the unconscious, and derivatives distant or distorted enough reach consciousness, which the technique of free association turns to use. Repression is individual and mobile, demanding a constant expenditure of energy that is relaxed in sleep. The ideational representative and the quota of affect have separate fates: the affect may be suppressed, appear as an affect, or be turned into anxiety, and a repression that does not spare unpleasure has failed. Substitute formations and symptoms are signs of a return of the repressed. Three examples compare repression in anxiety hysteria (an animal phobia), conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis.
- 1924
Otto Rank's *Das Trauma der Geburt und seine Bedeutung für die Psychoanalyse* (1924; English: *The Trauma of Birth*) was written in April 1923 and dedicated to Freud for his birthday on 6 May 1923. Rank presents it as a consistent extension of Freud's method. Following the analytic material down to its deepest layer, he arrives at the separation from the mother at birth. He calls it the "primal trauma" (Urtrauma) and the ultimate biological substrate of the psychical. His starting point is the analytic situation. In the dreams of the final phase of treatment, patients regularly represent the detachment from the analyst as a birth. The transference libido is at bottom maternal, and the cure is the belated, at last successful mastering of the birth trauma (Preface; "Die analytische Situation"). The anxiety the newborn experiences is the first content of perception. Once it is anchored in the psyche, it forms the primal repression (Urverdrängung) that bars the libido from striving back to the pleasurable intrauterine state. Every later anxiety reproduces it, beginning with the child's fear of the dark and of being alone. The middle chapters follow the birth trauma through the individual and through culture. Birth is the "primal castration" (Urkastration). Weaning and castration repeat the separation, and the Oedipus complex is its third repetition. Infantile sexual theories, the perversions and coitus itself are partial returns to the womb. The neuroses reproduce birth or the fetal state, as in hysterical conversion symptoms, phobias, obsessional brooding on origins and death, and the alternation of melancholia and mania. Psychosis is a failed attempt at cure. Under the heading of "symbolic adaptation", Rank finds the womb again in sleep and dreams and in the house, the temple, the city and the state. It returns in the hero, who overcompensates a severe birth, and in fairy tales and paradise myths. Religions move from mother goddesses and anxiety to a father god and guilt. Rank derives art from the sculptural reproduction of the maternal vessel and of one's own coming into being. Its Greek form idealizes the detachment of the human body from the animal mother (the Sphinx, the centaurs, Prometheus, the Trojan horse). Philosophy circles the same problem: Thales' water as the womb of all things, Plato's Eros and cave, and Kant's thing-in-itself. Socrates, the midwife's son, is in Rank's account the forerunner of analytic therapy. The two concluding chapters draw the theoretical and clinical consequences. Breuer's original discovery was that symptoms depend on forgotten traumas and on "conversion". Rank links it to the birth trauma, so that conversion becomes identical with the emergence of the psychical out of bodily innervation. The truly unconscious, Freud's Es, is "the embryonic that lives on unchanged in the growing ego". The primal fantasies (castration, the primal scene, Oedipus) have a real prenatal substrate. Rank therefore finds Jung's appeal to inherited phylogenetic memory unnecessary. The death drive and the compulsion to repeat aim at restoring the state before birth. Woman can reproduce the primal situation in pregnancy and childbirth. Man must compensate through identification with the mother and through cultural creation. From this Rank explains both the male character of culture and the social disparagement of women as consequences of primal repression. In therapy the analyst acts as a "midwife". The patient should not reproduce the birth trauma unconsciously at the parting from the analyst. Instead, the analyst should uncover it early in the transference and work it through, with a fixed end to the treatment. Analysis cannot change the unconscious itself, only the ego's attitude toward it. The neurotic has "got stuck a little earlier, in the birth trauma". Culture, art and above all psychoanalysis are more or less successful attempts to overcome it.
- 1926
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst), published in 1926 by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, is Freud's major revision of his theory of anxiety and his first systematic account of defence within the structural model of ego, id and super-ego set out in The Ego and the Id (1923). The book opens by distinguishing inhibition, a restriction of an ego function undertaken as a precaution or through an impoverishment of energy, from the symptom, the sign and substitute of an instinctual satisfaction that has not taken place and the result of repression. Its central move reverses Freud's earlier view that repressed libido is transformed directly into anxiety. Re-examining the animal phobias of Little Hans and the Wolf Man, he concludes that in both the motive force of repression was castration anxiety, the ego's fear of an external danger: anxiety makes repression, not repression anxiety. The ego is the sole seat of anxiety. It produces anxiety as a signal when it anticipates danger, and through the pleasure principle the signal enables it to inhibit the threatening process in the id. Anxiety is traced to a situation of helplessness before mounting excitation, of which birth is the prototype. Freud separates the traumatic situation, in which anxiety arises automatically, as in the actual neuroses, from the danger situation, in which the ego reproduces a weakened form of it as a warning. The danger situations form a developmental series, each tied to a phase: psychical helplessness in the immature ego, loss of the object in early childhood, castration in the phallic phase, the super-ego's anger and loss of its love in latency, and finally the fear of death, read as the super-ego projected onto the powers of fate. Neurosis arises where people go on reacting to danger situations long outgrown; symptoms are formed to remove the ego from the danger situation that anxiety signals. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an instinctual danger the ego does not know, as realistic anxiety is about a known one. The book compares symptom formation in phobia, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis. In obsessional neurosis, regression to the anal-sadistic stage, a severe super-ego and reaction formations shape the symptoms, and Freud describes undoing and isolation as defensive techniques beside repression. He reinstates 'defence' as the general term for all the ego's protective techniques, repression being one of them. He discusses Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (1924), crediting it with linking every danger situation to separation from the mother but rejecting the claim that the severity of the birth trauma decides who becomes neurotic; he names instead the long helplessness of the human infant, the interruption of sexual development between early childhood and puberty, and the ego's imperfect means of guarding against internal danger. The addenda distinguish five kinds of resistance and separate anxiety, the reaction to the danger that object loss brings, from pain, the reaction to the loss itself, and from mourning.
- 1980
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Kristeva's essay on abjection: the horror with which the subject casts off whatever threatens the boundary between self and other, from bodily waste and the corpse to the archaic maternal body from which it must separate. The book moves from Freud's case of Little Hans and the problem of phobia, through the laws of purity and defilement in Leviticus and their reworking in Christianity, to a long reading of Céline's prose as a literature of the abject. It opened a sequence of three psychoanalytic studies, continued in Histoires d'amour and Soleil noir. Leon S. Roudiez translated it into English as Powers of Horror (1982), and Noam Baruch into Hebrew (Resling, 2005).
- 1987
New Foundations for Psychoanalysis
Published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1987, and translated into English by David Macey (Blackwell, 1989) and by Jonathan House (The Unconscious in Translation, 2016). Laplanche draws together research going back to Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, to his earlier work with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Serge Leclaire, and to the first five volumes of his Problématiques seminars, to show how his positions connect. The book gives the first major statement of the general theory of seduction, which he refined for the rest of his life. Holding Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory in 1897 to have been a going-astray, he generalises seduction from a pathogenic event into the founding situation of every human being. The adult addresses to the child enigmatic signifiers, compromised by the adult's own unconscious, which the child must try to master and translate. Primal repression is the failure of this translation, and its untranslated remainders form the unconscious. On this basis Laplanche extends Freud's translational model of repression into a translational model of après-coup, of trauma and infantile sexuality, and of the constitution of the human subject as a self-narrating, self-theorising creature.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Trauma of Birth1924Evidence for a relation
- Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety1926Evidence for a relation
- New Foundations for Psychoanalysis1987Evidence for a relation
- Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection1980Evidence for a relation
- Repression1915Evidence for a relation
- Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)1911Evidence for a relation