Repression (psychological)

Psychological repression, or simply repression, is the psychological attempt made by an individual to direct one's own desires and impulses toward pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious. In psychoanalytic theory repression plays a major role in many mental illnesses, and in the psyche of the average person.

Repression (German: Verdrängung), 'a key concept of psychoanalysis, is a defense mechanism, but it pre-exists the ego, e.g., 'Primal Repression'. It ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, which would arouse anxiety if recalled, is prevented from entering into it'; and is generally accepted as such by psychoanalytic psychologists.

There has been debate as to whether (or how often) memory repression really occur and mainstream psychology holds that true memory repression occurs only very rarely.

As Freud moved away from hypnosis, and towards urging his patients to remember the past in a conscious state, 'the very difficulty and laboriousness of the process led Freud to a crucial insight'. The intensity of his struggles to get his patients to recall past memories led him to conclude that 'there was some force that prevented them from becoming conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious...pushed the pathogenetic experiences in question out of consciousness. I gave the name of repression to this hypothetical process'.

Freud would later call the theory of repression "the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests" ("On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement").

Freud developed many of his early concepts with his mentor, Josef Breuer. Moreover, while Freud himself noted that Arthur Schopenhauer in 1884 had hinted at a notion of repression (but he had only read him in later life), he did not mention that Johann Friedrich Herbart, psychologist and founder of pedagogy whose ideas were very influential in Freud's environment and in particular with Freud's psychiatry teacher Theodor Meynert, had used the term in 1824 in his discussion of unconscious ideas competing to get into consciousness.

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