Psychological Repression - Later Developments

Later Developments

Otto Fenichel stressed that 'if the disappearance of the original aim from consciousness is called repression, every sublimation is a repression (a "successful" one: through the new type of discharge, the old one has become superfluous)'.

Lacan stressed the role of the signifier in repression - 'the primal repressed is a signifier' - examining how the symptom is 'constituted on the basis of primal repression, of the fall, of the Unterdrückung, of the binary signifier...the necessary fall of this first signifier'.

Family therapy has explored how familial taboos lead to 'this screening-off that Freud called "repression"', emphasising the way that 'keeping part of ourselves out of our awareness is a very active process...a deliberate hiding of some feeling from our family'.

Read more about this topic:  Psychological Repression

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