Freudian repression, the Unconscious, and the Dynamics of Inhibition

Simon Boag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781855757387
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429914027
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

Possibly no other psychoanalytic concept has caused as much ongoing controversy, and attracted so much criticism, as that of 'repression'. Repression involves denying knowledge to oneself about the content of one's own mind and is most commonly implicated in disputes concerning the possibility of repressed memories of trauma (and their subsequent recovery). While fundamental in Freudian psychoanalysis, recent developments in psychoanalytic thinking (e.g., 'mentalization') have downplayed the importance of repression, in part due to less emphasis being placed on the importance of memory within therapy.

Part I
Repression within Freudian Theory

CHAPTER ONE
The beginning of the theory of repression

Background influences

Two main sources of influence appear to have shaped Freud’s thinking and the beginnings of psychoanalysis. One of these was the mechanistic and physicalist approach of figures such as Brücke, Meynert, and Helmholtz. The other, a psychological interest in neurotic phenomena and hypnosis, derived from figures such as Möbius, Charcot, Liébeault, Bernheim, Janet, and Breuer (Jones, 1953; Wollheim, 1991). In the latter camp, Josef Breuer’s case of Anna O is historically significant, since it provided the first insight into psychoanalytic explanation. Anna O suffered from, among other complaints, a rigid paralysis to the right side of her body and various thought disturbances. Breuer discovered that her symptoms related to specific psychological traumas, where memories of unpleasant experiences had been split off from her consciousness and subsequently become pathogenic. Recalling the traumatic experience (and attendant emotions) with the aid of hypnosis appeared to remove the symptoms. This method was applied to other cases published by Breuer and Freud in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1895d), which, according to Freud (on at least one occasion), marked the birth of psychoanalysis (Freud, 1913m, p. 207). This was a period of intensive thought for Freud, evidenced not only by his publications, but also by letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, and the posthumously published Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950[1895]). Although Freud’s thinking was to develop in various ways, many of the core assumptions underlying the theory of repression, as well as psychoanalytic theory as a whole, remained consistent with views developed during this time.

The dynamic viewpoint

The first reference to the “repressed” (verdrängt) occurs in Breuer and Freud’s Preliminary Communication (1893, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d) where “traumatic” memories are inaccessible due to motivated forgetting. Unlike Janet’s conclusion that hysteria was due to a congenital degeneracy (cf. Freud, 1894a, p. 46, 1913m, p. 207), Breuer and Freud write that, with hysteria, “it was a question of things which the patient wished to forget, and therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious thought and inhibited and suppressed” (Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 10). The postulation of repression is significant, since it proposes to explain psychopathology formation in terms of mental dynamics. That is, some forms of psychopathology, first referred to as “defence neuroses” and then later as “psychoneuroses”, resulted from psychical conflict, “a struggle between motive forces of different degrees of strength or intensity” (Freud, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 270, my italics). Thus, from the beginning, the central role of motivational conflict is evident and, according to Freud,

had the merit of entering into the interplay of the psychical forces and of thus bringing the mental processes in hysteria nearer to normal ones, instead of characterising the neurosis as nothing more than a mysterious disorder insusceptible to further analysis. [Freud, 1906a, p. 276]

From very early on, Freud recognizes the importance of unpleasure and pain as a motivating factor in all of human behaviour, writing in the Project: “The nervous system has the most decided inclination to a flight from pain” (Freud, 1950[1895], p. 307, his italics). Pain as a motivating stimulus implies that defence and repression are part of ordinary functioning, as seen in a comment in a draft sent to Fliess (Draft K, enclosed in a letter to Fliess dated 1 January 1896), where he writes that “there is a normal trend towards defence—that is, an aversion to directing psychic energy in such a way that unpleasure results” (Masson, 1985, p. 163). Repression is described as a “fending off” of “incompatible ideas” that arouse unpleasure (such as shame, self-reproach, or psychical pain) with the consequence of preventing the repressed ideas from association with conscious thinking (Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 157). Thus, repression is comparable to a withdrawal from painful stimuli and acts to minimize the immediate distress following “psychical traumas”: “The basis of repression can only be a feeling of unpleasure, the incompatibility between the single idea that is to be repressed and the dominant mass of ideas constituting the ego” (Freud, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 116).

“Trauma” was initially used in a very general sense where “[a]ny experience which calls up distressing affects—such as those of fright, anxiety, shame or physical pain—may operate as a trauma of this kind” (Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 6). Thus, the type of experience, the nature of distress, and intensity of the affective response appear not to be important for defining whether an experience was traumatic or not. However, Krystal (1978) discerns two identifiable models of trauma that emerge in Freud’s account: the unbearable situation model, emphasizing overwhelming affective states (e.g., fright) and the dynamics of pathogenesis model, hereafter referred to as the conflict model, where trauma results from psychical conflict and the “incompatibility” of desires. An example of this latter incompatibility is where one’s desires conflict with one’s moral beliefs. Awareness of this “contradiction” leads to distress and “mental torment” (Freud, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 165), and the “traumatic moment” is defined as an idea coming “into distressing opposition to the patient’s ego” (Freud, 1896b, p. 162):

The actual traumatic moment, then, is the one at which the incompatibility forces itself upon the ego and at which the latter decides on the repudiation of the incompatible idea. [Freud, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 123]

Hence, the motivation for repression is unpleasure and distress resulting from the recognition of incompatibility. Repression, therefore, is a motivated psychological activity, comprehensible in terms of defensive pain-avoiding responses (see Boag, 2007a,b).

The ego and repression

The view that repression is motivated by the recognition of incompatibility between desires and morality and the subsequent experience of unpleasure brings us to the role of the “ego” (Ich). According to Freud, it is the ego that suffers the trauma and which instigates repression:

The patient’s ego had been approached by an idea which proved to be incompatible, which provoked on the part of the ego a repelling force of which the purpose was defence against this incompatible idea. [Freud, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 269]

Thus a psychical force, aversion on the part of the ego, had originally driven the pathogenic idea out of association . .. [Freud, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 269; cf. Freud, 1896b, p. 170]

The term Ich or “I” (translated as the Latin “ego”) appears in Freud’s earlier writings to simply refer non-technically to a notion of “self” (Bettelheim, 1983; Brenner, 1957). However, while this is generally true, there are also early indications that Freud was developing a view of the ego that was comparable to the ego as the structured functional system found in his later formulations (e.g., Freud, 1923b). In Freud’s Project (1950[1895]), written during this period, the ego is an organization of constantly cathected neurones operating to maximize “discharge” of Q (quantity, the hypothesized psychophysical energy) from the psychophysical apparatus (Freud, 1950[1895], p. 323), a position also hinted at in the Studies (e.g., Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 269). It is generally correct to say that Freud entertained both positions throughout his work (McIntosh, 1986), and what is consistent between the two views is that the ego is intimately bound up with consciousness. On a number of occasions, Freud refers to “ego-consciousness” (e.g., Breuer & Freud, 1895d, pp. 291, 299), comparing this to a “defile” (Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 291). Repression, accordingly, is the blocking of the defile:

If there are difficulties in the way of mastering this single pathogenic memory—as, for instance, if the patient does not relax his resistance against it, if he tries to repress or mutilate it—then the defile is, so to speak, blocked . .. the single memory which is in a process of breaking through remains in front of the patient until he has taken it up into the breadth of his ego. The whole spatially-extended mass of psychogenic material is in this way drawn through a narrow cleft and thus arrives in consciousness cut up, as it were, into pieces or strips. [Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 291]

This use of a spatial metaphor for understanding the ego’s role in repression is fairly common in Freud’s writings. For instance, at other times, repression is described as a “barrier erected by the will” (Freud, 1894a, p. 50), and one question that requires resolving is exactly how such metaphors are to be understood.

Repression as an intentional activity

Since repression is a motivated activity, instigated by the ego in response to “trauma”, the question is then whether repression is a simple act of avoiding painful stimuli that can be described as voluntary or “intentional”. Breuer and Freud’s early reference to repression explicitly refers to repression in intentional terms with respect to it being “a question of things which the patient wished to forget, and therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious thought and inhibited and suppressed” (Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 10, my italics). Freud’s editor, Strachey, however, believes that Freud did not mean by this reference to intentionality that repression involves any implication of ordinary voluntary intention of which the subject might be conscious. Instead, Strachey writes,

On some of its earlier appearances the term ‘repressed’ is accompanied . .. by the adverb ‘intentionally’ (‘absichtlich’) or by ‘deliberately’ (‘willkürlich’). This is expanded by Freud in one place [Freud, 1894], where he states that the act of repression is ‘introduced by an effort of will, for which the motive can be assigned’. Thus the word ‘intentionally’ merely indicates the existence of a motive and carries no implication of conscious intention. [Strachey, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 10n, his italics]

That is, repression is simply a motivated response to pain that could occur without knowledge of its occurrence (Strachey, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 10n), a position that has been taken to justify the prevailing viewpoint that repression necessarily occurs unconsciously (see Boag, 2010a). That repression necessarily must be unconscious has been vigorously challenged by Erdelyi (1990, 1993, 2001, 2006), who notes that if repression can occur consciously then there is no dispute that repression exists in terms of ordinary selective attention (2006, p. 500). However, whether repression necessarily must be unconscious hinges partly upon what is precisely meant by the terms “unconscious” and “conscious” and it is interesting to note that Freud’s description of events in the Studies can, at times, easily be interpreted along the lines that repression could occur with awareness. For example, both Erdelyi (1990, p. 13) and Macmillan (1991, pp. 102–103) note that Freud’s description of the case of Miss Lucy R in the Studies explicitly demonstrates that the act of repression occurred with the subject’s knowledge. Her initial “act of will”, bringing repression into operation against the love for her employer, was easily recalled. Miss Lucy R had desires for her employer that “she had thought intentionally to leave in obscurity and had made efforts to forget” (Freud, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 117). For a time, she had been aware of these desires, but after realizing that these were unfulfillable, “she decided to banish the whole business from her mind” (Freud, in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 118). In an exchange where Miss Lucy R agrees with Freud’s interpretation of her repressed desire creating her hysteric conversion, Freud asks her, “But if you knew you loved your employer why didn’t you tell me?”, and she responds: “I didn’t know—or rather, I didn’t want to know. I wanted to drive it out of my head and not think of it again; and I believe latterly I have succeeded” (in Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 117). Thus, both Erdelyi and Macmillan’s position appear justified, since Miss Lucy R appears aware of the act of repression.

On the other hand, some commentators claim that although Freud initially postulated repression as a conscious process, he quickly came to abandon this point of view in favour of repression as an unconscious process (Brenner, 1957; Eagle, 2000a). Presumably, this must occur somewhere between the time of the Studies’ publication (1895) and subsequent writing, since, by 1896, we find Freud referring to repression as “the psychical mechanism of (unconscious) defence” (Freud, 1896b, p. 162, his italics) and “that it is impossible for the ego to direct to the repressed material the part of the psychical energy to which conscious thought is linked” (Draft K, in Masson, 1985, p. 167). However, no clear point of transition occurs, since Freud (1895c) also notes early on that “the expulsion of the incompatible idea is brought about in an unconscious manner which has left no trace in the patient’s memory” (pp. 79–80) and that rather than changing views, there is another interpretation to be considered. This interpretation involves an apparent paradox with respect to whether it is possible to both know and yet not know something at the same time. In the case of Miss Lucy R, cited above, Freud writes in a footnote that this paradoxical state of affairs explicitly is the case, writing,

I have never managed to give a better description than this of the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at the same time. It is clearly impossible to understand it unless one has been in such a state oneself. [Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 117n]

After then providing a similar example from his own experience, Freud describes this as being “afflicted by that blindness of the seeing eye” (p. 117n), all of which suggests that the debate as to whether repression is either conscious or unconscious is too simplistic and something much more complex is occurring. This, it will be argued, is the central difficulty with understanding unconscious processes, subliminal perception, and so forth, and reconciling this apparent paradox provides the key to understanding repression and, to some extent, unlocking the dynamics of the mind.

Repression and awareness of the target

One issue that is much clearer in Freud’s writings is that in so far as repression is motivated by conflict and ensuing unpleasure, it must involve awareness and evaluation of the “offending target”. As Freud recognized, for repression to occur there must be awareness of the distressing idea (a “traumatic moment”) on at least one occasion:

Consciousness, plainly, does not know in advance when an incompatible idea is going to crop up. The incompatible idea that, together with its concomitants, is later excluded and forms a separate psychical group must originally have been in communication with the main stream of thought. Otherwise, the conflict that led to their exclusion could not have taken place. It is these moments, then, that are to be described as “traumatic” . . .. [Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 167; cf. Draft K, in Masson, 1985, pp. 164–165]

Additionally, Freud notes that after the initial repression there could be several other instances when the distressing idea becomes kno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: REPRESSION WITHIN FREUDIAN THEORY
• PART II: MAKING SENSE OF REPRESSION
• PART III: EXPLAINING REPRESSION
• POSTSCRIPT
• REFERENCES
• INDEX