Repression is thought to give rise to anxiety and to neurotic symptoms, which begin when a forbidden drive or impulse threatens to enter the conscious mind.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: The repressed mental contents held in the unconscious retain much of the psychic energy or power that was originally attached to them, however, and they can continue to influence significantly the mental life of the individual even though or because a person is no…. Repression as observed in psychiatric practice, for example, represents almost complete, highly selective forgetting, far beyond that anticipated by interference theorists.

Repression (psychology) - Wikipedia

Attempts to study repression through laboratory procedures have failed to yield systematic data that could be used to test theoretical conclusions. Meltzer published a survey of experimental literature on "the relationships between feeling and memory" in an attempt to determine the relevance of laboratory findings to "that aspect of the theory of repression which posits a relationship between hedonic tone and conscious memory. Nevertheless, Meltzer pointed out shortcomings in the studies he reviewed, and in MacKinnon and Dukes's view he also "recognized that most of the investigations which he reviewed had not been designed specifically to test the Freudian theory of repression.


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In , the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig and his co-author G. Mason criticized Meltzer, concluding that the studies he reviewed suffered from two basic problems: In MacKinnon and Dukes's view, psychologists who wanted to study repression in the laboratory "faced the necessity of becoming clear about the details of the psychoanalytic formulation of repression if their researches were to be adequate tests of the theory" but soon discovered that "to grasp clearly even a single psychoanalytic concept was an almost insurmountable task.

Repression (psychology)

MacKinnon and Dukes write that, while psychoanalysts were at first only disinterested in attempts to study repression in laboratory settings, they later came to reject them. They comment that while "the psychologists had criticized each other's researches largely on the grounds that their experimental techniques and laboratory controls had not been fully adequate, the psychoanalysts rejected them on the more sweeping grounds that whatever else these researches might be they simply were not investigations of repression.

One of the issues Freud struggled with was the status of the childhood "memories" recovered from repression in his therapy. He concluded that "these scenes from infancy are not always true. Indeed, they are not true in the majority of cases, and in a few of them they are the direct opposite of the historical truth".

While accepting "the realities of child abuse", the feminist Elaine Showalter considered it important that one "distinguishes between abuse remembered all along, abuse spontaneously remembered, abuse recovered in therapy, and abuse suggested in therapy". There is debate about the possibility of the repression of psychological trauma. While some evidence suggests that "adults who have been through overwhelming trauma can suffer a psychic numbing, blocking out memory of or feeling about the catastrophe", [26] it appears that the trauma more often strengthens memories due to heightened emotional or physical sensations.

Repression

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Censorship psychoanalysis Cognitive dissonance Defence mechanism Denial Foreclosure psychoanalysis Motivation , a term related to desire Narcissistic defence sequences. Clinical Psychology Science and Practice.


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