Repression

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.