Repression
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A high level of repression can cause a high level of anxiety or dysfunction, although this may also be caused by the repression of one particularly traumatic incident.
Repression
Repressed memories may appear through subconscious means and in altered forms, such as dreams or slips of the tongue 'Freudian slips'. A child who is abused by a parent later has no recollection of the events, but has trouble forming relationships. A woman who found childbirth particularly painful continues to have children and each time the level of pain is surprising. A man has a phobia of spiders but cannot remember the first time he was afraid of them. A person greets another with 'pleased to beat you' the repressed idea of violence toward the other person creeping through.
Repression sometimes called motivated forgetting is a primary ego defense mechanism since the other ego mechanisms use it in tandem with other methods. When we deliberately and consciously try to push away thoughts, this is suppression. In Freudian terminology, repression is the restraining of a cathexis by an anti-cathexis. It is not all bad. If all uncomfortable memories were easily brought to mind we would be faced with a non-stop pain of reliving them. To Freud, the goal of treatment, i.
Repression is one of Anna Freud's original defense mechanisms.
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Examples of repression in a Sentence the state's repression of its citizens They survived 60 years of political repression. That includes the United States. Najib and his allies used political influence, cash handouts and news media repression to try to keep corruption accusations at bay for years. First Known Use of repression 15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a. Learn More about repression. Resources for repression Time Traveler!
Explore the year a word first appeared. Dictionary Entries near repression repressed repressed inflation represser repression repressor repressure repressurize. Secondly, successful analysis of repression depends heavily on patients having good language skills and a capacity for self-examination. To the extent that patients aren't much for language, or are extremely impulsive, they are not going to be good candidates for an "insight therapy". Third, insight therapies like this sort of analysis of repression are inherently passive in nature.
The best a therapist can hope for when analyzing a patient's repressions back to them assuming that is all they do is that the patient will become more aware of their conflicts. Mere awareness will not teach patients how to cope with those conflicts in a better way than repressing them, however. Patients who don't know better ways of coping with their conflicts might actually get worse when those conflicts are rubbed in their faces if further steps are not taken to teach alternative coping methods. When you add these factors up, what you find is that a therapy based on analysis of repression is going to be best suited for use in helping people who are already quite capable and resourceful but who are nevertheless stuck or hung up in some manner due to internal conflicts that are keeping them from being happy.
The classic conflict where analysis of repression will be useful is one between desire and duty, and the classic patient will be one who has been choosing duty over desire for a long time and it just isn't working out for them, perhaps resulting in mild depression or anxiety. The analysis of repression will be useful to bright people stuck in developmental crises that inhibit them. It may prove useless or even harmful to less verbal people, or to people who have biologically driven mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia , serious debilitating forms of anxiety or depression where insight will not be enough to effect a cure , trauma-based disorders where uncovering of conflicts might trigger some sort of re-traumatization if done carelessly and under-controlled emotion conditions such as an anger problem.
I should mention that the original version of psychoanalysis as conceived by Freud and partially described above is largely a historical relic today so far as I can tell. Hugely influential, the therapy has been reworked and reinterpreted countless numbers of times so as to emphasize the insights of new thinkers and to respond to the changing needs of the therapy environment. My incomplete understanding of modern psychoanalytic theories there are several suggests to me that repression is not as prominent an idea anymore as it used to be.
Modern practitioners seem more concerned with analysis of patients' social relationships and "object relations" e. Repression is still an important and critical idea, but it doesn't seem to be the center of attention within psychodynamic circles these days. I've framed repression in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic terms in this essay thus far, mostly because those folks invented the concept and made it prominent, and also because it is my desire here today to talk about psychodynamic technical contributions to therapy. I don't want to let the essay end, however, without pointing out that other schools have also dealt fairly extensively with the idea of repression, and that the whole concept has been enriched by this cross-pollination.
For example, there is a whole non-psychodynamic literature concerning coping styles that has extensively examined repression. Within this literature, repression is thought of as part of a coping spectrum called "repression-sensitization". Everyone can be placed somewhere on this spectrum, either towards the repression side of things, towards the sensitization side, or somewhere in the middle.
In this "repression-sensitization" literature, repression is regarded as a strategy that some people use for coping with disturbing, stressful information. This is a trait-like strategy, meaning that it is a habitual style that people become dependent upon and use preferentially over other possible coping strategies. People who employ a repressive coping strategy basically react to disturbing information by employing denial, avoidance and a carefully honed failure to pay attention.
They might avoid conversations that convey disturbing news, or prefer to maintain uncomfortable silences even when a confrontation might clear the air. They make extensive use of distraction as a means of coping; if they are worried about something they'll go do something else to occupy their minds. Their motto is "It's not happening", and their basic assumption about danger is that what they don't know won't hurt them.
The polar opposite coping method to repression is called sensitization Where repressors avoid learning disturbing news, sensitizers go the opposite direction and seek out more disturbing news until they know everything.
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It's not that sensitizers don't find the news disturbing they do ; rather, it has to do with their basic assumption towards danger, which is that the more they know about dangers, the better they can navigate them so as to minimize damage to themselves and those they love. Sensitizers seek out as much information as they can in an attempt to keep themselves more informed, and thus more in control and ultimately safer.
Freud as a core part of his early theory of the mind makes clear the point that Freud saw the mind as a sort of battle ground where waring forces duked it out and a metaphorical repression was seen to occur. Voyager , an episode of the science fiction television series Star Trek: Test your vocabulary with our question quiz! Freud thought that many forms of psychopathology that's a fancy term for "mental illness" were caused by repression. Their motto is "It's not happening", and their basic assumption about danger is that what they don't know won't hurt them. Description Repression involves placing uncomfortable thoughts in relatively inaccessible areas of the subconscious mind. Freud was about half right in this assumption.
Just as repressors go overboard in the avoidance department, sensitizers frequently go overboard in the worry department. They tend to play "what if" games to try to figure out what might happen in every possible circumstance. Their basic motto is "information is power". They will pursue this motto even when the consequence to them is information overload and a whole lot of unnecessary worry and strain.
Research examining the repression-sensitization coping spectrum suggests that repression may be best thought of as a mild variety of dissociation; that same mental process that is responsible for some forms of amnesia and for multiple personality disorder, and for the phenomena of hypnotism. Dissociation occurs when some mental contents become cut off from the main stream of consciousness and hang out in a kind of bubbled off existence For instance, dissociation can occur during a traumatic event.
When this occurs, the trauma victim finds himself spaced out and kind of not in reality, even while the trauma event continues to unfold. A rape victim might find herself watching herself getting raped as though it was a movie, for example. Trauma dissociations can sometimes become "repressed memories", meaning that they get avoided so aggressively and for so long that they are successfully forgotten. This kind of thing sometimes happens to abuse victims and also to combat veterans. Repressed or dissociated memories are not so much put into a special place called the "unconscious" as they become so strongly avoided that the entryways to those memories get forgotten or are quickly and automatically diverted to safer thoughts through a distraction mechanism.
Since nothing is allowed to bring those memories to mind, they appear to cease to exist. They don't really cease to exist, however. Sometimes they reappear unbidden after years of disuse. I recall one case where a combat veteran reported that after many years of normal existence he one day walked into a store and was triggered into remembrance of a dissociated trauma memory when a clerk's last name on his name badge was the same as the last name of the officer who had run his combat unit.
That officer had apparently been blown into bits in front of my patient. Once the bridge back to the old memory was reestablished, the memory came back vividly, making his life very difficult, and leading to his diagnosis with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder PTSD. That repression is likely a mild form of dissociation casts light on the ways that psychologically traumatized patients with PTSD are treated. Trauma memories involve death and dismemberment, horrible abuse or violation, torture, and similar intense and horrible occurences.
Trauma memories are avoided and pushed out of consciousness as best as possible because they are truly too horrible and too intense for a given patient to digest and process. The path of 'repression' e. Breaking down the power of trauma memories is the goal of any therapy for traumatized people. This is typically accomplished in multiple ways, but all of those ways attempt to accomplish the goal of therapeutic "titration", which is a fancy way of saying that you want to simultaneously gently push patients to address their trauma memories and thereby process and digest them when those memories can be tolerated, and also help them to avoid and dampen those memories when they become overwhelming.
Dampening is accomplished with medication, by teaching self-soothing and relaxation techniques, and through supportive psychotherapy that addresses problems in living unrelated to trauma. The pushing to address and process trauma memories is accomplished by providing a safe environment, either individually or in a group setting, where trauma memories can be discussed.
This latter task is not exactly like the sort of analysis of repression intervention that a psychodynamic therapist might provide a client, but both interventions similarly seek to help patients make their unconscious avoided material conscious again. I think that is worth noting. I said above that some research suggested that habitual repression was likely a mild form of dissociation, but I didn't describe what that evidence looked like.
It looks something like this. In the early years of repressor-sensitizer study, a particular questionnaire was used to identify who was a repressor and who was a sensitizer. A large body of research was conducted, and then all called into question, when the validity of that questionnaire was itself questioned. It seemed that the questionnaire was measuring how willing people were to describe themselves as anxious, and not measuring repression per se.
Repression (psychology)
There ought to have been a way to differentiate people who were truly low in anxiety from repressors, who should be people who were dealing with some emotional arousal by denying the basis for that arousal. The old questionnaire couldn't make that distinction, however, so a new means of measuring repression needed to be developed. The new means that ultimately was developed took this form. A group of researchers was able to differentiate a group of truly low anxious people from repressors through the use of two separate questionnaires, one asking people to rate how anxious they are, and the other a measure of how rigidly they followed social conventions and rules e.
Repression - Wikipedia
The questions this test contained were all geared to be things people were supposed to do but often didn't do in practice. This latter questionnaire was called a measure of people's degree of "social desirability" but it actually seemed to measure a kind of defensiveness and desire to conform and be seen as a moral person.
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While both repressors and truly low anxious people described themselves as low anxious on the anxiousness questionnaire, the repressors scored very highly on the social desirability questionnaire, while the truly low anxious group did not. Here is the kicker. In addition to giving these folks questionnaires, the researchers also hooked them up to machines that measured their heart rate and skin conductance.
Heart rate and skin conductance are measures of body arousal that cannot be consciously controlled by most people.
These body measures tend to go up when you are anxious whether you want to hide the fact that you are anxious or not.