Repression
Freud's paper "Repression" is part of a larger work that was to be called Preliminary Essays on Metapsychology and that was to have included twelve essays; only five of these were published. Other titles were considered, notably "Introduction to Metapsychology" and "Overview of the Transference Neuroses" (Jones, 1955, p. 185). Metapsychology was conceived as a group of conceptual models that did not come directly from clinical experience, but which aimed to explain clinical experience in terms of mechanisms or fictional perspectives. Freud's project in these essays was to introduce and synthesize its main elements. In "On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement" (1914d) he had defined the theory of repression as "the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests . . . the most essential part of it" (p. 16).
In this paper Freud returned to the idea of repression that had previously, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), been conflated with the idea of the defense, which he had developed beginning with the "Neuro-Psychoses of Defence" (1894a). Here repression is the only defensive modality, whereas after 1920 repression would be seen as one defense among others. Freud believed that he had found an absolutely original idea in repression, and he did not acknowledge having encountered it in the work of Schopenhauer when Rank told him of analogous perspectives in the latter's work (Gay, 1988).
In "Repression" Freud described repression as "something between flight and condemnation" (p. 146) and said that "it is a concept which could not have been formulated before the time of psycho-analytic studies" (p. 146). His argumentation in this essay is developed step by step, by reviewing all the possibilities of this vicissitude of the instinctual impulse. First of all, given that instinctual satisfaction is by definition pleasurable, it was necessary to posit a conflict that "would . . . cause pleasure in one place and unpleasure in another" and the condition that "the motive force of unpleasure shall have acquired more strength than the pleasure obtained from satisfaction" (p. 147).
However, this mechanistic explanation is followed by another that is dynamic in nature. Repression and the unconscious are "correlated" (p. 148), and "We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious. With this a fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it" (p. 148). This fixation will constitute a point of attraction for other, later repressions that are thus said to occur through "after-pressure" (p. 148).
The same dynamism affects the instinctual representative that is fixed in the unconscious, where derivatives are formed and connections established. In "Repression" Freud explained that "Repression acts . . . in a highly individual manner. Each single derivative of the repressed may have its own special vicissitude; a little more or a little less distortion alters the whole outcome" (p. 150). If these derivatives are sufficiently distorted, they can freely enter into consciousness. Such occurrences provide the basis for psychoanalytic treatment, in that the repressed contents can emerge through free association, enabling a conscious reconstitution of these contents through psychoanalytic interpretation. Mentioned in passing here is the issue of fetishism, which was already alluded to in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and to which Freud would return much later (1940a [1938]). Here he proposed, as the origin of fetishism, a division of the instinctual representative into two parts, one of which is subjected to repression while "the remainder, precisely on account of this intimate connection, undergoes idealization" (p. 150).
The distinction that Freud then proposed between representation and quota of affect enabled him to refine his ideas on the vicissitude of the instinct. One possibility is its "transformation into affects, and especially into anxiety, of the psychical energies of instincts" (p. 153). The repressed thus remains active, and returns indirectly through these substitutive formations, but also in the form of various symptoms. The "success" of repression is often mitigated: A given representation may indeed be eliminated, but something else has been substituted for it, and "it [repression] has failed altogether in sparing unpleasure" (p. 153).
In terms of the three major categories of neurosis—anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria, and obsessional neurosis—Freud pointed to the links that can be established between the workings of repression and the formation of neurotic symptoms. However, he added in conclusion that further research in this area needed to be done.
Source Citation
Sigmund Freud. (1915d). Die Verdrängung. Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, 3: 129-138; GW, 10: 248-261; Repression. SE, 14: 146-158.
Bibliography
Gay, Peter. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. London and Melbourne: Dent.
Jones, Ernest. (1953-57). Sigmund Freud: Life and work. London: Hogarth.
—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
