The unified theory of repression

Abstract

Repression has become an empirical fact that is at once obvious and problematic. Fragmented clinical and laboratory traditions and disputed terminology have resulted in a Babel of misunderstandings in which false distinctions are imposed (e.g., between repression and suppression) and necessary distinctions not drawn (e.g., between the mechanism and the use to which it is put, defense being just one). "Repression" was introduced by Herbart to designate the (nondefensive) inhibition of ideas by other ideas in their struggle for consciousness. Freud adapted repression to the defensive inhibition of "unbearable" mental contents. Substantial experimental literatures on attentional biases, thought avoidance, interference, and intentional forgetting exist, the oldest prototype being the work of Ebbinghaus, who showed that intentional avoidance of memories results in their progressive forgetting over time. It has now become clear, as clinicians had claimed, that the inaccessible materials are often available and emerge indirectly (e.g., procedurally, implicitly). It is also now established that the Ebbinghaus retention function can be partly reversed, with resulting increases of conscious memory over time (hypermnesia). Freud's clinical experience revealed early on that exclusion from consciousness was effected not just by simple repression (inhibition) but also by a variety of distorting techniques, some deployed to degrade latent contents (denial), all eventually subsumed under the rubric of defense mechanisms ("repression in the widest sense"). Freudian and Bartlettian distortions are essentially the same, even in name, except for motive (cognitive vs. emotional), and experimentally induced false memories and other "memory illusions" are laboratory analogs of self-induced distortions.

Towards a Cognitive and Neurobiological Model of Motivated Forgetting

“…Thus, suppressing unwanted memories over a long time may fragment the experience and render it subject to distortion and reconstruction processes of the sort discussed in other contributions to this symposium. Thus, an understanding of the memorial consequences of motivated forgetting is likely to require consideration of retrieval suppression and distortion processes (Erdelyi, 2006 ) .…”

Self-Defining and Early Childhood Memories: Subjective Intensity Rating of Memory-Related Emotions

“…In our sample, reconstructive processes may have modified affective intensity over time. Some evidence suggests that, within personality characteristics, defensive styles are related to the affective nature of childhood memories, leading to a reduced negative affect [33,34]. It would be interesting to explore how defensive psychological functioning shapes the ability to detect discrete emotional states characterizing shared autobiographical memories.…”

The Quantitative Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perturbation-Theoretic Approach to the Complexity of Neuronal Systems in the Neuroses

“…A term generally ascribed to Johann Herbart (as cited in Erdelyi, 2006), and later taken on by Freud (1915) to denote a defensive function responsible for creating much of the unconscious, repression, "turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious" [his italics] (Freud, 1915, p. 147), has proven itself an instrumentally demonstrable proposition at once obvious and empirically elusive (Michael and Benjamin, 2006). Current research into the topic has approached this metapsychological cornerstone from various ancillary perspectives, ranging from the Pavlovian mathematical modeling and experimental determination of the neuropharmacology associated with SSRI therapy and the suppression of aversive predictions (Dayan and Huys, 2008;Crockett et al, 2012;Huys, et al, 2012), to the resource-depletion framework of task aligned/misaligned cognitive functioning (Storbeck, 2011), or the optogenetic activation of individual brain circuits and structures such as the amygdala, which mediates anxiety, and is sure to have a role in repression (Freud, 1926;Deisseroth et al, 2011;Norman, 2010Norman, , 2011.…”