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, and he began 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"). The 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. When it is internalized, the threat of punishment related to this form of anxiety becomes the superego, which intercedes against the desires of the id (which works on the basis of the pleasure principle). Freud speculated that "it is perhaps the emergence of the super-ego which provides the line of demarcation between primal repression and after-pressure".
Therapy Neurosis may occur when the personality develops under the influence of the superego and the pressure of repressed impulses, leading to behavior that is irrational, self-destructive, or antisocial. A psychoanalyst may try to ameliorate this behavior by seeking to discover the repressed aspects of the patient's mental processes and reintroducing them to the patient's conscious awareness - "assuming the role of mediator and peacemaker ... to lift the repression".
Reactions The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre maintained that there is no "mechanism" that represses unwanted thoughts. Since "all consciousness is conscious of itself" we will be aware of the process of repression, even if skilfully dodging an issue. The philosopher Thomas Baldwin stated in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) that Sartre's argument that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed is based on a misunderstanding of Freud. The philosopher Roger Scruton argued in Sexual Desire (1986) that Freud's theory of repression disproves the claim, made by Karl Popper and Ernest Nagel, that Freudian theory implies no testable observation and therefore does not have genuine predictive power, since the theory has "strong empirical content" and implies testable consequences.
Later developments The psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel stressed that 'if the disappearance of the original aim from consciousness is called repression, every sublimation is a repression (a "successful" one: through the new type of discharge, the old one has become superfluous)'. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan stressed the role of the signifier in repression — 'the primal repressed is a signifier' — examining how the symptom is 'constituted on the basis of primal repression, of the fall, of the Unterdrückung, of the binary signifier ... the necessary fall of this first signifier'. Family therapy has explored how familial taboos lead to 'this screening-off that Freud called "repression"', emphasising the way that 'keeping part of ourselves out of our awareness is a very active process ... a deliberate hiding of some feeling from our family'.
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