Repression
Neurotic defence; mental inhibitions level on the DSM-IV scale; secondary in McWilliams' scheme. An unacceptable feeling, wish or memory is kept out of awareness, while its effects leak out in symptoms, slips and odd blanks.
What drives it
Keeps forbidden desire, rage or fear from becoming conscious, so the person's picture of themselves stays intact.
How it shows
Work
Reports low anxiety while body and behaviour say otherwise: tight voice, sweating, avoidance of one project. Blanks on a name, a meeting, an obvious conflict. Says “I'm not angry at all” about a colleague who undercut them, and means it. The listener senses a missing feeling.
Relationships
Remembers the facts of a parent leaving, if that, but nothing of how it felt. Surprised by tears at a film. The partner sees a pattern the person genuinely cannot see.
Self
Hard to catch directly. The tells are forgetting things linked to one theme, a dream that disturbs you, or a reaction someone else points out that you had no idea of.
What tells it apart
Suppression: Suppression is conscious: the person can tell you what they are setting aside. Repression leaves nothing to report.
Denial: Denial ignores an outside fact; repression hides an inner feeling or memory.
Dissociation (including depersonalisation and derealisation): Dissociation brings altered states, lost time or unreality; repression leaves a gap without any altered state.
A test
Look for body or behavioural signs of a feeling the person sincerely denies; a consistent mismatch suggests repression or a repressive coping style.
Questions to carry
- Where do the body and behaviour show a feeling the person sincerely says isn’t there?
- Which blank in my memory or slip of the tongue surprised me lately, and what was nearby?
How strong the research is
mixed. The recovered-memory controversy (Loftus and others) found little evidence that traumatic memories are routinely blocked and later recovered intact, while the milder repressive coping style (Weinberger, 1979) is well measured.
Where it comes from
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, 1895; Sigmund Freud, 1915
On the family tree: Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud
Sources
- Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1895)
- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)