Psychological repression, also psychic repression or simply repression, is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one's own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious. Repression plays a major role in many mental illnesses, and in the psyche of average people.
'Repression, a key concept of psychoanalysis, is not a defense mechanism as it pre-exists the ego e.g. 'Primal Repression'. It ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it'; and is generally accepted as such by psychoanalytic psychologists.
However, regarding the distinct subject of repressed memory, there is debate as to whether (or how often) memory repression really happens and mainstream psychology holds that true memory repression occurs only very rarely.
Read more about Psychological Repression: Freud's Theory, Later Developments, Related Concepts: Repressed Memories
Famous quotes containing the word repression:
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)