Repression
Repression is the psychological attempt to direct one's own desires and impulses toward pleasurable instincts by excluding them from one's consciousness and holding or subduing them in the unconscious. According to psychoanalytic theory, repression plays a major role in many mental illnesses, and in the psyche of the average person.
Repression is a key concept of psychoanalysis, where it is understood as a defense mechanism that "ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering it."
There has been debate as to whether (or how often) memory repression really occurs and mainstream psychology holds that true memory repression occurs only very rarely. American psychologists began to attempt to study repression in the experimental laboratory around 1930. However, psychoanalysts were at first disinterested in attempts to study repression in laboratory settings, and later came to reject them. Most psychoanalysts concluded that such attempts misrepresented the psychoanalytic concept of repression.
As Sigmund Freud moved away from hypnosis, and towards urging his patients to remember the past in a conscious state, "the very difficulty and laboriousness of the process led Freud to a critical insight." The intensity of his struggles to get his patients to recall past memories led him to conclude that "there was some force that prevented them from becoming conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious... pushed the pathogenetic experiences in question out of consciousness. I gave the name repression to this hypothetical process."
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Repression is a key concept of psychoanalysis, where it is understood as a defense mechanism that "ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering it."
There has been debate as to whether (or how often) memory repression really occurs and mainstream psychology holds that true memory repression occurs only very rarely. American psychologists began to attempt to study repression in the experimental laboratory around 1930. However, psychoanalysts were at first disinterested in attempts to study repression in laboratory settings, and later came to reject them. Most psychoanalysts concluded that such attempts misrepresented the psychoanalytic concept of repression.
As Sigmund Freud moved away from hypnosis, and towards urging his patients to remember the past in a conscious state, "the very difficulty and laboriousness of the process led Freud to a critical insight." The intensity of his struggles to get his patients to recall past memories led him to conclude that "there was some force that prevented them from becoming conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious... pushed the pathogenetic experiences in question out of consciousness. I gave the name repression to this hypothetical process."
x----x
This blog entry is sponsored by KFC.
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