Repression (psychoanalysis)
keeping out from consciousness ideas or impulses that are unacceptable to it
In psychology and psychoanalytic theory, repression is a defense mechanism that "ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it." As such, psychoanalytic theory asserts that repression plays a major role in mental illnesses.
Sigmund Freud
The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in seeking to move away from hypnosis and towards encouraging patients to remember their past in a conscious state, observed that the process was strikingly difficult, leading him to suspect that there was some sort of psychic mechanism intervening to prevent access to consciousness. The intensity of his struggles to get patients to recall past events led him to conclude that there was some force that "prevented them from becoming conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious", and which actively "pushed the pathogenetic experiences in question out of consciousness." Freud gave the name of repression to this hypothetical process. He 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").
Psychologist and founder of pedagogy, Johann Friedrich Herbart, whose ideas had influenced Freud's psychiatry teacher Theodor Meynert, had used the term 'repression' as early as 1824, in a discussion of unconscious ideas competing to get into consciousness.
Stages
Freud considered that there was "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", as well as a second stage of repression, repression proper (an "after-pressure"), which affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative.
In the primary repression phase, "it is highly probable that the immediate precipitating causes of primal repressions are quantitative factors such as ... the earliest outbreaks of anxiety, which are of a very intense kind". The child realizes that acting on some desires may bring anxiety. This anxiety leads to repression of the desire.
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