Psychological repression

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Psychological repression, or simply repression, is the psychological act of excluding desires and impulses (wishes, fantasies or feelings) from one's consciousness and attempting to hold or subdue them in the subconscious. Since the popularization of Sigmund Freud's work in psychoanalysis, repression is popularly known to be a common defense mechanism.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Nature

Repression is considered to be an unconscious mechanism and can often be detrimental. It may be contrasted with thought suppression, which is entirely conscious and thus can be managed. Because repression is unconscious, it manifests itself through a symptom or series of symptoms, sometimes called the "return of the repressed". A repressed sexual desire, for example, might re-surface in the form of a nervous cough or a slip of the tongue. In this way, although the person is not conscious of the desire and so cannot speak it out loud, the person's body can still articulate it through the symptom.^{[citation needed]}

A person can, for example, suppress the impulse to attack another for higher reasons, such as sociability, or more mundane reasons, like keeping a job - especially if it is a co-worker or boss being considered as a potential target for the attack. The desire is sometimes conscious, but is thwarted by the exercise of willpower due to a rational decision to avoid the action. However, there are an enormous amount of ideas and associations triggered by our desires that do remain unconscious.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Reasons

In spite of the popularity and wide use of this concept in psychoanalysis and popular literature, the proposition of "motivated forgetting", where the motivation is both unconscious and aversive, the process of repressing past events has never been demonstrated in controlled research.^{[citation needed]} However, the repression of information chosen for consideration in the present or future, because it is viewed as aversive has a powerful relationship to what will be drawn out of the unconscious to be made available for honest, conscious deliberation. This has an enormous amount of supporting research in the area of cognitive dissonance theory started in the 1950s by Leon Festinger among others.^{[citation needed]}

It is often claimed that traumatic events are repressed, yet it appears that it is more likely that the occurrence of these past events are remembered, if in a distorted manner, at least partially because the physical sensations associated with trauma strengthen the memory. One problem from an objective research point of view is that a "memory" is usually defined as what someone says or does, that can be measured and recorded, since we have no way to verify the existence and/or accuracy of a memory except by the correspondence of what someone clearly expresses with some other representation of past events^{[citation needed]} (written records, photographs, reports of others, etc). See Repressed memory.

Normal psychological repression, on the other hand, is a universal quality of personality and perception, and is required for proper development to take place. In this context, repression is sometimes spoken of in two stages of personality development, which are progressively involved in the creation of the individual's sense of "self" and "other", of "good" and "bad", and of the aspects of personality called "ego" and "superego".^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Stages

In the Primary Repression phase, an infant learns that some aspects of reality are pleasant, and others are unpleasant; that some are controllable, and others not. In order to define the "self", the infant must repress the natural assumption that all things are equal. Primary Repression then is the process of determining what is self, what is other; what is good, and what is bad. At the end of this phase, the child can now distinguish between desires, fears, self, and others.^{[citation needed]}

Secondary Repression begins once the child realizes that acting on some desires may bring anxiety. This anxiety leads to repression of the desire. The threat of punishment related to this form of anxiety, when internalized becomes the "superego", which intercedes against the desires of the "ego" without the need for any identifiable external threat.^{[citation needed]}

Abnormal repression, or complex neurotic behavior involving repression and the superego, occurs when repression develops or continues to develop, due to the internalized feelings of anxiety, in ways leading to behavior that is illogical, self-destructive, or anti-social.^{[citation needed]}

A psychotherapist may try to reduce this behavior by revealing and re-introducing the repressed aspects of the patient's mental process to his conscious awareness, and then teaching the patient how to reduce any anxieties felt in relation to these feelings and impulses.^{[citation needed]}