Concept
Repression
Keeping thoughts, memories or wishes out of consciousness.
- Broader concept
- Defense
- Narrower concepts
- Primal repression
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 15
gave rise to
- Reaction formation 1905 Freud first conceives reaction formation as a way of carrying out repression: in the Dora case the opposite of the thought to be repressed is over-strengthened so that it keeps the repressed thought down. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety he still speaks of “repression by reaction formation”, though there he also ranks it as a mechanism of defence in its own right.
- Symbolism 1918 In Jones's account, true symbolism arises only from repressed ideas, which is why it runs in one direction, from the repressed to its substitute.
- Parapraxis In the classical account a parapraxis results from interference by a thought or wish that has been pushed out of consciousness because it is unacceptable: the forgetting, slip or mislaying shows both the repressed content and the resistance against it. The Dora case speaks of acts consciousness 'will not know of', and Jones ties the concealment of a slip's source to its unacceptable nature.
reworked by
- Otto Rank 1924 Rank roots the whole process of repression in the trauma of birth. The anxiety of birth is the first barrier set against the striving to restore the lost intrauterine pleasure, and in it he recognises the primal repression, which later repressions and the forgetting of earliest memories repeat.
- Sigmund Freud 1926 In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud reverses his earlier view that repressed libido is turned into anxiety: the ego's anxiety at a danger is what sets repression going. He also narrows the concept, bringing back 'defence' as the general name for the ego's techniques in conflict and keeping 'repression' for one particular method among them.
- Ronald Fairbairn Fairbairn held that what is repressed is first of all bad internalised objects, and later the parts of the ego bound to them, rather than impulses or memories.
diverged into
- Denial 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.
- Selective inattention Where Freud spoke of repression, Sullivan described material kept out of awareness by inattention, or left unformulated because it had never been put into communicable form, reserving dissociation for what the self actively refuses.