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repression (refoulement) The concept of repression is one of the
most basic concepts in psychoanalytic theory, and denotes the process by
which certain thoughts or memories are expelled from consciousness and
confined to the unconscious. Freud was first led to hypothesise the process of
repression through his investigation into the amnesia of hysterical patients.
He later distinguished between primal repression (a 'mythical' forgetting of
something that was never conscious to begin with, an originary 'psychical
act' by which the unconscious is first constituted) and secondary repression
(concrete acts of repression whereby some idea or perception that was once
conscious is expelled from the conscious). Since repression does not destroy
the ideas or memories that are its target, but merely confines them to the
unconscious, the repressed material is always liable to return in a distorted
form, in symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, etc. (the return of the
repressed).
For Lacan, repression is the fundamental operation which distinguishes
neurosis from the other clinical structures. Whereas psychotics foreclose,
and perverts disavow, only neurotics repress.
What is it that is repressed? At one point Lacan speaks of the signified as the
object of repression (E, 55), but he soon abandons this view and argues instead
that it is always a signifier that is repressed, never a signified (Sl1, 218). This
latter view seems to correspond more closely to Freud's view that what is
repressed is not the 'affect' (which can only be displaced or transformed) but
the 'ideational representative' of the drive.
Lacan also takes up Freud's distinction between primal repression and
secondary repression:
1. Primal repression (Ger. Urverdr‰ngung) is the alienation of desire when
need is articulated in demand (E, 286). It is also the unconscious signifying
chain (E, 314). Primary repression is the repression of the first signifier. 'From
the moment he speaks, from that precise moment and not before, I understand
that there is repression' (S20, 53). Lacan does not see primary repression as a
specific psychical act, localisable in time, but as a structural feature of
language itself - namely, its necessary incompleteness, the impossibility of
ever saying 'the truth about truth' (Ec, 868).
2. Secondary repression (Ger. Verdr‰ngung) is a specific psychical act by
which a signifier is elided from the signifying chain. Secondary repression is
structured like a metaphor, and always involves 'the return of the repressed',
whereby the repressed signifier reappears under the guise of the various
formations of the unconscious (i.e. symptoms, dreams, parapraxes, jokes,
etc.). In secondary repression, repression and the return of the repressed 'are
the same thing'.
== def ==
The ego's mechanism for suppressing and forgetting its instinctual impulses.
