Freud's Theory
As 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 crucial 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 of repression to this hypothetical process'.
Freud would later call the theory of repression "the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests" ("On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement").
Read more about this topic: Psychological Repression
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