Critical Discussion of the Psychoanalytic Concept of Repress
Critical Discussion of the Psychoanalytic Concept of Repression
Repression is defined (White, 1964,p214) 'the forgetting, or ejection from consciousness of memories of threat, and especially the ejection from awareness of impulses in oneself that might have objectionable consequences.'
In layman's terms when forming a memory, the brain takes what we see, hear, smell, feel and taste and fills in the blank spaces with information that we have perceived from common knowledge and stores it as a memory. But sometimes something happens that is so shocking that the mind grabs hold of the memory and pushes it underground into some inaccessible corner of the unconscious.
The psychoanalytic concept of repression as a defense mechanism is closely linked to the Freudian idea of an unconscious mind. Early Freudians saw the unconscious mind as having the same properties as that of the conscious mind. Just as the conscious mind was believed capable of consciously inhibiting events by suppression, so the unconscious was considered capable of inhibition or cognitive avoidance at the unconscious level by repression.
Suppression is said to happen, when one voluntary and consciously withholds a response. Unconscious repression in contrast may function as an automatic guardian against anxiety, a safety mechanism that prevents threatening material from entering consciousness.
Symptoms are formed as a result of repression even though the patient may not be aware of it. Freud says; (Freud, 1973, p335) 'We must now form more definite ideas about this process of repression. It is the precondition for the construction of symptoms.' Symptoms serve as a substitute for the patient for something that repression is holding back. Freud says; 'A symptom like a dream, represents something as fulfilled: a satisfaction in the infantile manner' (Freud, 1973, p413).
Freudian therapy is like an entrance hall, with a room adjoining it, in which consciousness is found also, but that between these two rooms resides a watchman, who acts as a censor to those entering the second room from the entrance hall. This watchman represents resistance in psychoanalysis, which is present during psychoanalytic treatment, when the psychoanalyst endeavors to uncover the repression. Resistances in psychoanalytic treatment if lifted are able to bring the past into focus and act as support systems in the analysis. In order to uncover the repression the analyst has to remove the resistance, which is constantly changing during treatment, i.e. the intensity increases as the analyst draws nearer to a new...