Repression

The idea is present at the very start of Freud's work with Breuer. Their Preliminary Communication of 1893 already says that patients had intentionally repressed certain things from their conscious thought. In Studies on Hysteria¹ this becomes an account of how hysteria arises. An idea incompatible with what Freud called the dominant mass of ideas of the ego is pushed out of association with the rest of the mind, and once cut off in this way it becomes pathogenic.

In Freud's account, the motive for this pushing away was defence. He had introduced that term in 1894. In 1895 he described defence as a way of turning a strong idea into a weak one by stripping it of the affect attached to it, and Studies on Hysteria traces hysteria to the repression of an incompatible idea from the motive of defence. This set Freud apart from Breuer. Breuer's account of hysteria rested on hypnoid states, while Freud spoke of a defence hysteria and suspected that defence was the more basic of the two.

The clinical finding that went with this was resistance, which Freud introduced in the same book. The ego force that had expelled the incompatible idea showed itself again when the physician tried to bring the idea back, as an opposition to its recall. From the start, then, repression and resistance were two aspects of one force: the first keeps the idea away, the second opposes its return in treatment.

Freud's fullest account came in Repression², the second of his metapsychological papers of 1915, alongside The Unconscious³. Repression is there one of the vicissitudes a drive may undergo, and its essence is stated simply: it consists in turning something away from consciousness and keeping it at a distance.

Freud divided the process into phases. In primal repression the ideational representative of a drive is denied entry into consciousness altogether. This creates a fixation, and the representative stays fixed in the unconscious. Freud had foreshadowed the idea as fixation in the Schreber case⁴ of 1911. Repression proper is an after-pressure (Nachdrängen) that acts on the derivatives which the primally repressed attracts to itself. Repression is therefore not a single event. It needs a constant expenditure of energy and often fails, and its failures give rise to substitute formations and symptoms.

A second distinction concerns what repression acts on. A drive is represented in the mind both by an idea and by a quota of affect, and in Freud's account the two have separate fates. With this in hand he compared how repression works in anxiety hysteria, in conversion hysteria and in obsessional neurosis.

The Unconscious recasts the same process in topographical and dynamic terms. It describes repression as a withdrawal of cathexes together with an anticathexis, or countercathexis. The primally repressed never had a conscious cathexis that could be withdrawn, so it is held down by countercathexis alone. The paper also describes the unconscious system, into which the repressed falls. The system Ucs. knows no negation or doubt, follows the primary process, is timeless, and puts psychical reality in place of external reality. A conscious presentation comprises a thing-presentation and the word-presentation that belongs to it; an unconscious presentation has the thing-presentation alone.

In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety⁵ Freud gave up a thesis central to his earlier theory: that repressed libido is turned directly into anxiety. He now held that the ego is the sole seat of anxiety and produces it as a signal of danger. Through the pleasure principle, that signal lets the ego inhibit processes in the id. In the book's formula, anxiety makes repression, not repression anxiety. In the cases of Little Hans and the Wolf Man, he concluded, the motive of repression had been castration anxiety. The older thesis survived only as a description, and the automatic anxiety it described was kept for the actual neuroses.

The book also moved repression to a new place among the ego's operations. A symptom is now the sign and substitute of an instinctual satisfaction that did not take place, and it is the product of repression. Its function is to remove the ego from the danger situation. In obsessional neurosis Freud found two techniques, undoing and isolation, that stand in for repression. This led him to bring back the old term defence as the general name for all such techniques, with repression as one technique among them. In doing so he acknowledged that he had long let repression stand for defence as a whole.

Freud also returned to primal repression. Most repressions met in treatment, he now held, are cases of after-pressure that presuppose earlier primal repressions. He suggested that quantitative factors occasion those first repressions: an excitation strong enough to break through the protective shield.

Finally, the book places repression among the sources of resistance. Freud counted five resistances from three sources. Three come from the ego: the resistance of repression itself, the transference resistance and the gain from illness. One comes from the id, the repetition compulsion, and calls for working through. The fifth comes from the super-ego, as the need for punishment.

In Freud's case histories, repression is the mechanism behind the symptom. In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria⁶, the case of Dora, he read the patient's symptoms as expressions of repressed sexual wishes laid down in layers. The first was love for Herr K. Over it lay a revived attachment to her father, which itself served to fend off that love. At the deepest layer was love for Frau K. Freud set the case against Pierre Janet's account of fixed ideas, tracing hysteria instead to repressed sexual wishes.

The same text shows one thought being used to keep another down. The opposite of the thought to be repressed is strengthened beyond measure so that it holds the repressed thought in place, and the concept of reaction formation derives from this mechanism. In 1926 Freud still spoke of repression by reaction formation, although he also ranked reaction formation as a defence in its own right.

Repression also accounts for the small failures of everyday life. A slip shows at once the repressed content and the resistance against it. The Dora case speaks of acts that consciousness will not know of. Ernest Jones, in Rationalization in Every-Day Life⁷, tied the hiding of a slip's source to the unacceptable nature of that source. Mental processes, he argued, have causes the person neither knows nor will admit, so slips are put down to accident. When someone treats a question about the origin of a belief as absurd, this signals that its real source is unacceptable. The same paper brought the term rationalisation into psychoanalysis.

Jones also made repression the condition of symbolism. In The Theory of Symbolism⁸ he argued that true symbolism arises only from repressed ideas. This is why it runs in one direction: the ideas that are symbolised are the most primary and the most repressed. The symbol is a compromise formation between the repressed forces and the repressing ones. Jones treated the principle that only what is repressed is symbolised as the touchstone of the psychoanalytic view of symbolism.

In The Trauma of Birth⁹, Otto Rank rooted the whole process of repression in the trauma of birth. For Rank birth is the primal trauma. Once anchored, the anxiety of birth is the first barrier against the striving to return to the pleasure of the intrauterine state. That barrier is the primal repression, which Rank thereby gave a concrete content. Every later anxiety reproduces it, beginning with the child's fear of the dark and of being alone. Later repressions, including the forgetting of the earliest memories, repeat it. Rank carried the idea far beyond the clinic, tracing both the disparagement of women and philosophy's preoccupation with the problem of origins to primal repression. Freud answered him in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. Against the birth trauma he set three factors: the infant's long helplessness, the interruption of sexual development, and the ego's limited means of defending itself against internal dangers.

Ronald Fairbairn moved the theory of repression onto the ground of object relations. In The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects¹⁰ (1943), he argued that what is repressed is in the first place not impulses or painful memories but bad objects that have been internalised. Impulses and memories are repressed because they are bound up with such objects.

The paper sets out two further ideas. The first is the moral defence. A child who depends on neglectful or abusive parents takes their badness into itself and becomes the guilty one so that they can remain good. The superego, formed from internalised good objects, is the agent of this defence, and guilt guards against the far more dreaded situation of being in the power of bad objects. The second concerns treatment. The deepest resistance in analysis is the fear of releasing these objects, sustained by the patient's libidinal attachment to them. The return of the repressed is the return of bad objects, which Fairbairn likened to possession, calling the psychotherapist a successor of the exorcist. Treatment must release them in the transference, once the analyst has become a sufficiently good object.

In Endopsychic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships¹¹ (1944), Fairbairn went further and built his model of endopsychic structure on repression. Since one part of the ego can repress another, repression implies a multiplicity of egos. The central ego uses aggression to repress two others: a libidinal ego, bound to the exciting object, and an internal saboteur, later called the antilibidinal ego, bound to the rejecting object. The saboteur's attack on the libidinal ego is an indirect repression, which Fairbairn identified with the part of the process Freud had described. For Fairbairn, splitting of the ego and repression are one process, and aggression is its dynamic. The libidinal ego's attachment to its repressed object is a resistance in its own right, which helps to explain the negative therapeutic reaction.

Jean Laplanche, in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis¹², tied primal repression to his general theory of seduction. The child tries to translate the enigmatic messages that adults address to it, and primal repression is the failure of that translation. What cannot be translated is left behind as the first unconscious contents. Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror¹³, linked abjection to primal repression. For her, the abject marks the subject's first, precarious separation from the archaic mother, before the distinction between subject and object is secured.

Several later theories define their own mechanisms by contrast with repression. In The Analysis of the Self¹⁴, Heinz Kohut set disavowal against it. Repression produces a horizontal split, keeping material unconscious. Disavowal produces a vertical split: archaic grandiose demands stay conscious but are walled off from the reality ego and exist side by side with it. Kohut also distinguished both from negation in Freud's sense of 1925. Horizontal splits arise at a deeper level through repression and at a higher level through negation.

In the interpersonal psychiatry of Harry Stack Sullivan, set out in Clinical Studies in Psychiatry¹⁵, selective inattention takes over much of the ground Freud had given to repression. Where Freud spoke of repression, Sullivan described two kinds of material: what is kept out of awareness by inattention, and what is left unformulated because it was never put into communicable form. He reserved dissociation for what the self actively refuses. Unlike dissociated material, what is selectively unattended stays close to awareness and can be noticed again fairly easily. Sullivan regarded selective inattention as one of the most pervasive means by which the self-system keeps a person's view of themselves unchanged.