24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
==Enotes==
===Repression===
====Explanation====
Repression is one of the most important Freudian processes, and it is the basis for other ego defenses and neurotic disorders. It is a means of defense through which threatening or painful thoughts or feelings are excluded from awareness. Freud explained repression as an involuntary removal of something from consciousness. Anna Freud called it "motivated forgetting."
====Examples====
Victims of war or other trauma sometimes face experiences that are too overwhelming for them to assimilate into their conscious mind. In order to cope, they must protect themselves from letting the painful experience incapacitate them. The result is that they unconsciously repress the emotion. This emotion may resurface unexpectedly if a similar life event such as an accident or other victimization triggers the repressed memories.
==Freudian Dictionary==
<blockquote>The infantile ego, under the domination of the external world, disposes of undesirable instinctual demands by means of what are called repressions.<ref>{{OoPA}} Ch. 8</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>The essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting and keeping something out of consciousness.<ref>{{Repr}}</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>The theory of repression became the foundation-stone of our understanding of the neuroses .... It is possible to take repression as a centre and to bring all the elements of psychoanalytical theory into relation with it.<ref>{{ABS}} Ch.3</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>Repression takes place in two distinct situations, namely, when an unwelcome instinctual impulse is aroused by an external perception, and when the impulse arises internally without such provocation.<ref>{{PoA}} Ch. 2</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>Decisive repressions all occur in early childhood.<ref>{{QLA}} Ch. 3</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>Repression ... is, at bottom, an attempt at flight.<ref>{{PoA}} Ch. 10</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>The Ego feels a demand from an instinct which it wishes to withstand, because it suspects that satisfaction is dangerous, would evoke a traumatic situation, a' collision with the outer world; but it cannot master it, because it has not yet the strength necessary. The Ego then treats the risk from the instinct as though it were an outside danger, and makes an attempt at flight; it withdraws from that part of the Id, leaving it to its fate, after having refused it all the help which it normally affords to instinctual impulses. We put it, that Ego undertakes a ''repression'' of these instinctual impulses. By the act of repression the Ego follows the pleasure principle, which otherwise it is wont to correct, and it suffers harm on this account. The harm consists in the fact that the Ego has now imposed a lasting limitation on its sphere of power. The repressed instinctual impulse is henceforth isolated; it is left to itself and inaccessible, but this means that it cannot be influenced. It goes its own way.<ref>{{QLA}} Ch. 3</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>Repression proceeds from the ego, which, possibly at the command of the superego, does not wish to be a party to an instinct cathexis originating in the id. Through repression the ego accomplishes the exclusion from consciousness of the idea which was the carrier of the unwelcome impulse. Analysis frequently demonstrates that the idea has been retained as an unconscious formation.<ref>{{PoA}} Ch. 2</ref></blockquote>
<blockquote>It is an important element of the theory of repression that this process is not one which takes place on a single occasion but is one demanding a continuous expenditure of effort.<ref>{{PoA}} Ch. 10</ref></blockquote>
===Repression, Ego and===
<blockquote>As I understand it, in repression the ego functions under the influence of external reality and therefore excludes the result of the substitutive process from this reality. <BR>The ego controls the entrance into consciousness as well as the passage into activity directed to the environment; in repression it exerts its power at both places. The instinct representative experiences the one, the instinctual impulse itself the other side of the ego's manifestation of authority.<ref>{{PoA}} Ch. 2</ref></blockquote>
===Repression, Ego and Id and===
<blockquote>In the case of repression the fact of crucial importance is that the ego is an organized entity, whereas the id is not; in fact, the ego is the organized part of the id. It would be quite unjustifiable to conceive of the ego and the id as if they were two opposing camps-as though through repression the ego were seeking to suppress a part of the id, and that thereupon the rest of the id came to the assistance of the part attacked and measured its strength against that of the ego.<ref>{{PoA}} Ch. 3</ref></blockquote>
===Repression, Primal===
<blockquote>The majority of repressions with which we have to do in therapeutic work are instances ot subsequential repression. They presuppose primal repressions of an earlier date which exercise over the more recent situation their gravitative influence.<ref>{{PoA}} Ch. 2</ref></blockquote>
===Repression, Superego and===
<blockquote>Now we have posited a special function within the ego to represent the demand for restriction and rejection, i.e. the super-ego, we can say that repression is the work of the super-ego,-either that it does its work on its own account or else that the ego does it in obedience to its orders.<ref>{{NILP}} Ch. 3</ref></blockquote>
===Repression, Tendency to===
<blockquote>The tendency to repression ... must be traced back to the organic bases of the character, upon which alone the psychic structure rises.<ref>{{LDV}} Ch. 6</ref></blockquote>
{{Freudian Dictionary}}
==Below==
