Prehistory
The term was originally introduced into psychology 'in 1928, when Édouard Pichon published, in Pierre Janet's review, his famous article on "The Psychological Significance of Negation in French"'... borrowed the legal term forclusif to indicate...facts that the speaker no longer sees as part of reality'. The publication took part against the background of the Twenties dispute between Freud and René Laforgue over scotomization. 'If I am not mistaken', Freud wrote in 1927, 'Laforgue would say in this case that the boy "scotomizes" his perception of the woman's lack of a penis. A new technical term is justified when it describes a new fact or emphasizes it. This is not the case here'. Freud went on to suggest that if one wanted to 'reserve the word "Verdrängung" for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be "Verleugnung" '.
Read more about this topic: Foreclosure (psychoanalysis)