Repression: A Defense Mechanism

Understanding Repression: How the Mind Protects Itself

Repression is a defense mechanism employed to exclude distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings from the conscious mind. For the most part, repression often is used to keep unwanted sexual or aggressive urges or painful childhood memories from intruding on consciousness, creating anxiety and disrupting homeostatic balance.

Repression is a coping strategy. Susan David, an instructor in psychology at Harvard University, explains that coping strategies “arise from discomfort with ‘negative’ emotions” ( David, 2016. Kindle location: 754).

However, repression only excludes conscious acknowledgement of tensions that continue to exist inside. Researchers theorize that repression leads to unexpressed energy that store in the body eventually leading to other neurotic and physical ailments.

Freudian psychoanalysts help bring repressed thoughts and emotions to the surface where clients can confront and manage them.

Why Do We Repress?

Kendra Cherry wrote that “repression is one way the mind can deal with difficult thoughts or emotions” ( Cherry, 2022). There are many helpful ways to deal with emotion overload, and repression is one of them. We must deal with reality. By escaping important details, we limit choices. However, if we are paralyzed by worry, we also fail to make wise decisions. We must create balance.

Erich Fromm wrote “there are many reasons why a person may repress certain strivings, often throughout his life. He might be afraid of being punished, of not being loved, or of being humiliated if his repressed impulses were known to others (or to himself…)” ( Fromm, 1973. Kindle location: 4077).

Dr. Gabor Maté wrote “in between repression and hyper-reactiveness is a healthy median” ( Maté, 2011, Kindle location: 2,268). Most defense mechanisms have a sweet spot where they beneficially provide relief so we can continue to perform at a high level. Our work is creating that balance.

Repressing of Interfering Thoughts

The police officer chasing a dangerous criminal that presents a threat to the community, would not be able to perform if her thoughts were constantly ruminating over the possibility of death. The doctor performing a sensitive surgery where the slightest wrong move could kill the patient, represses interfering thoughts, and then acts according to his expertise, with complete attention focused on the operation. While the man drinking at the bar, may do well to not repress thoughts of his family waiting at home.

These repressions are examples of the temporary repression of thoughts, however, another type of repression, the Freudian defensive repressions tend to hold much more in the unconscious then a momentary reprieve from distracting thoughts. These repressions are automatic, unconscious mechanisms employed to regulate emotion.

Repression is Sifting Awareness

​Simon Boag, Ph.D. explains that “repression shifts awareness from distress-laden targets (e.g., distressing memories, anxiety-arousing desires, or threats to self-esteem), which thereby terminates or decreases distress” ( 2020).

Several studies support the benefits of repression, finding that those that cope with high-stress events with repression have lower incidents of depression ( Phipps, et al. 1997; Prasertsri, et al. 2011). These studies coincide with the psychological concept of depressive realism.

Sometimes our histories are too devastating, our futures to bleak. We must blunt the reality, filtering the data, keeping our allostatic load within a reasonable and manageable level.

Here’s the problem, repression is an unconscious function. We can’t decide how much to repress. Our unconscious mind has already made these determinations. Sigmund Freud writes, “this unconscious state then coincides with the latent ability to become conscious” ( 1920, Kindle location: 65). The repressions may push undesirable thoughts, facts and feelings so far into unconscious realms that we struggle to effectively function in the real world.

The Problem with Repression

Rollo May questions uninhibited repression in his book Freedom and Destiny, he asks, “is the purpose of the therapist to help people to be happy? Happy in a world in which unemployment and inflation burgeon at the same time?” He continues, “such happiness can be purchased only at the price of repressing and denying too many of the facts of life, a denial that works directly against what most of us believe is the optimum state of mental health” ( May, 1981).

If we repress too much, it is almost as if we are creating our own experience machine, like the one proposed by Robert Novak. He asked his readers, “suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain” ( 1974, p. 42).

Losing Touch with Reality

We can paint a rosy picture of reality through repression without completely losing touch, keeping a  realistic optimism that keeps life in manageable levels while allowing enough information to flow to consciousness that we can still effectively function.

​T. Franklin Murphy explains, “unmitigated repression presents a problem. Our denial of personal temptations prevents corrective and protective action. Perhaps, notoriously conservative (liberal) politicians repress unwanted that violate standards that they vehemently protect. Yet, later someone catches them embarrassingly compromising those principles. They repress thoughts associated with an impulse and consciously keep their tidy conservative self image, but occasionally act on contrary impulses in an airport’s bathroom stall” ( 2021).

Cherry warns that, “repression can also be used to avoid confronting difficult experiences and feelings, and this can have meaningful consequences” ( 2022).

The trick is coming to terms with life the way it is, they theorize, allowing the unconscious to become conscious and then utilizing the more mature mechanism of suppression to keep life in functional levels.

Repression and Suppression 

Murphy wrote, “repression is similar to its cousin suppression. The major difference is that repression occurs unconsciously while suppression is a conscious act” ( 2021). 

In his powerful book, Adaptations of Life, George Vaillant lists suppression as a Highly Adaptive Defense (Level 7).​ Because of repressions susceptibility to being overused, blocking essential information, Valliant considers repression as a Neurotic Defense (Level 5A) ( 2012).

Freud’s Concept of Repression

Freud’s Conscious and Unconscious:

Sigmund Freud’s work centered around the conscious and unconscious workings of the brain. He taught that there were three planes of consciousness: unconscious, preconscious, and conscious ( 19 2 3). Within the dynamic interactions of personality, these three realms of knowing influence behavior and sense of being.

Repression is the unconscious process of delegating unacceptable desires away from conscious awareness. The repressed, he explains, is not readily retrievable. 

“The repressed is for us the paragon of the unconscious. We see, however, that we have a twofold unconscious, the latent, yet able to become conscious, and the repressed, which, in and of itself and by implication, is unable to become conscious” ( 1923). 

Freud’s psychoanalytic therapy focused on bringing the repressed to consciousness. He wrote, “now all our knowledge is bound always to consciousness. Only through it too can we become acquainted with the unconscious, by rendering it into consciousness” ( 1923). 

“For Freud self-knowledge means that man becomes conscious of what is unconscious; this is a most difficult process, because it encounters the energy of resistance by which the unconscious is defended against the attempt to make it conscious” ( Fromm, 1974).

The entire struggle is that those repressing do not know they are repressing or what they are repressing. We found in the 80’s and 90’s that several therapists, believing they were retrieving repressed memories of abuse, were actually facilitating false memories of abuses that never occurred.

​​Freud’s Ego Ideal and Repression:

Freud believed that the ego was the motivating factor for repression. “Repression, we have said, proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater precision that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego” ( 1914).

We create an ideal of who we believe we are. Freud called this the  ego ideal, later he referred to the ideal as the  superego. When events, thoughts, or emotions challenge the ideal, instead of working through the  cognitive dissonance, we repress to preserve our ego ideal.

“As we have learnt, the formation of an ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression” ( 1914). Our world surrounding us, social connections, and family rules are primary factors in the formation of an ego ideal.

“We have learnt that libidinal instinctual impulses undergo the vicissitude of pathogenic repression if they come into conflict with the subject’s cultural and ethical ideas” ( 1914). Instead of seeing ourselves as not fitting in, we repress elements of ourselves (instinctual drives).

​​Freud’s Repression Libidinal Energy:

​Murphy wrote, “Sigmund Freud emphasized that thoughts and feeling affects are individual components. In the case of repression, the thought associated with a feeling affect is repressed while the feeling affect remains” ( 2021).

In his Book  Civilizations and Discontents Freud wrote, “when an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are transformed into symptoms and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt” ( 1930). 

Anna Freud

Anna Freud, Sigmund’s youngest daughter, helped clarify many of her father’s concepts of defense mechanisms. She wrote, “​the term psychoanalysis should be reserved for the new discoveries relating to the unconscious psychic life, i.e., the study of repressed instinctual impulses, affects, and fantasies” ( 1936).

Anna Freud explains that for successful repression “the ego knows nothing of it; we are aware of it only subsequently, when it becomes apparent that something is missing.” She further expounds on this concept, writing “all the defensive measures of the ego against the id are carried out silently and invisibly. The most that we can ever do is to reconstruct them in retrospect: we can never really witness them in operation” ( 1936).

​Leslie S. Greenberg, Ph.D. expands on this concept. He wrote that “emotions and motivations, however, do not reside in the unconscious fully formed waiting to be unveiled when the forces of repression are overcome.” Like Sigmund’s theory that the thoughts and emotions are split off from each other, Greenberg teaches that repressed emotions reside in our bodies and are not fully formed. He continues to explain once pulled back into consciousness  “implicit emotion, or bodily felt sensations, can be transformed into discrete conscious experiences of specific emotions by putting the felt sensations into words” ( 2022, location: 1,071).

Memory and Repression

Basically, what is repressed is stored in fragments, and pulling them back into consciousness “​is to reconstruct them in retrospect.”

Anna Freud explains the psychoanalyst’s task is to “undo what has been done by the defense, i.e., to find out and restore to its place that which has been omitted through repression, to rectify displacements, and to bring that which has been isolated back into its true context.” 

Repression, Anna Freud explains, “is not only the most efficacious, it is also the most dangerous mechanism.” She wrote that “if the ego employs repression, the formation of symptoms relieves it of the task of mastering its conflicts” ( Freud, 1936).

Repression and Denial

Repression and denial share similar features with subtle differences. They share the common goal of pushing discomforting information away, protecting the ego from the work of assimilating unpleasant information.

Since the introduction of repression as a defense mechanism by Freud, and the development of the concept by his daughter, the definition of repression has fluctuated, often used interchangeably with denial. However, a more fundamental psychoanalyst may maintain the original definition that repression is the repressing of internal urges or instinctual drives and denial is used to describe denying external realities.

Of course, depending on the psychic processes involved, these often overlap.

​Freud remarked in An Outline of Psychoanalysis that “denial disclaims the external world as repression disclaims the instincts” ( Jacobson, 1957). Denial is an attack on the perceptions.

The Adaptiveness of Repression

Defenses are not independent of each other. They change over time and change with circumstances. One defense may mature or regress into another defense.

​External influences and context create dynamics where defense may intervene. Once the external environment changes the protective mechanism may weaken. In the case of repression, the hidden secrets may emerge, puncturing consciousness, once the protection is no longer necessary. Fromm wrote, “how much a person represses his passionate desires depends not only on factors within himself but on the situation; if the situation changes, repressed desires become conscious and are acted out” ( 1974).

Valliant shared an example of one of a man that repressed information but “once the danger of career stagnation was averted, the repressed could return, and he could share with the Study the account of his previous job dissatisfaction” ( 2012, location: 1,703). 

​While solving one set of problems, repression often masks another set of problems. As Anna Freud stated it relieves “the task of mastering its conflicts.” We may repress, avoid and deny but many problems are more than a temporary obstacle. Our failure to confront them leaves them in place to continually haunt our development.

One study found that ‘repressors’ remained very defensive, perhaps, carefully guarding the repressed material. The researchers discovered that “dispositional repressors report feeling little or no anxiety but are defensive and protective about their self-esteem… repressors are extremely self-protective” ( Furnham & Lay, 2016).

Repression and Illness

Freud theorized that “inhibited negative feelings can lead to severe diseases like phobias, neurosis, or conversion hysteria” ( Mund & Mittle, 2012).

Research has found that repressors still experience physical stress when confronted with stimuli. They “typically react with increased heart rate and decreased skin conductance resistance” ( Mund & Mitte, 2012). We can theorize that stress is still felt in response to stressful stimuli; however, the repressor self reports no reaction. Basically, they repress the sensation of experiencing of stress.

​Dr. Gabor Mate wrote in his classic book  When the Body Says No that, “when emotions are repressed…this inhibition disarms the body’s defences against illness. Repression—dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm—disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors” ( 2011).

Myers and Brewin wrote “a growing body of evidence documents a link between repression…and the development and course of disease” ( 1997).

Possible Health Related Impact of Repression

Research has linked an array of signs and symptoms with repressed emotions. These include:

• High blood pressure
• Skin conditions
• Fatigue
• Obesity
• Headache
• Dizziness
• Back, neck, chest, and abdominal pain ( Patel & Patel, 2019).

Perhaps, the extreme stress, without normal mechanisms of discharge through expression of emotions, contribute to a weakened system unable to defend against other diseases.

Murphy wrote that “we have a window of tolerance where we can process life’s demands. The stresses motivate action, we respond and our life returns to a healthy homeostatic balance where we heal from the event” ( 2021a). If repressions interfere with resolving the original conflict, these stresses may accumulate and repeat, leading to larger physiological demands, leaving the biological system more susceptible to disease.

The repeated stress may also stress our systems by the repeated physiological demands of heightened blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and the other biological functions associated with a fired up the  sympathetic nervous system. T. Franklin Murphy explains that “the sympathetic nervous system is the branch of the autonomic nervous system that mobilizes our bodies to act” ( 2022).

Associated Concepts and Theories

Repression is a fascinating concept in psychology, often associated with a variety of other psychological constructs and theories. Here are some of the key concepts related to repression:

• Defense Mechanisms: Repression is one of the many defense mechanisms identified by Freud. It operates unconsciously to keep disturbing or threatening thoughts from becoming conscious.
• The Unconscious Mind: Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind is closely linked to repression. He believed that the unconscious mind stores all repressed memories and emotions.
• Psychoanalysis: This is the therapeutic approach developed by Freud that focuses on bringing repressed material into conscious awareness to deal with psychological distress.
• Catharsis: The process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions. Freud believed that recalling repressed experiences could lead to catharsis.
• Resistance: In psychoanalysis, resistance refers to the reluctance to bring repressed material into conscious awareness, often manifesting in behaviors like changing the topic or missing therapy sessions.
• Suppression: Unlike repression, suppression is a conscious effort to put aside and hide uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.
• Denial: Another defense mechanism where individuals refuse to accept reality or facts, pushing them out of conscious awareness.
• Traumatic Memories: Freud believed that people often repress memories that are too difficult to confront, especially traumatic ones.
• Neuroses: Freud used this term to describe mental struggles resulting from unresolved repressed material, which could manifest as anxiety, depression, and stress.
• Sublimation: A defense mechanism where negative urges are transformed into positive, socially acceptable actions. It’s a way of dealing with the anxiety that might stem from repressed urges.

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Understanding these concepts can provide a deeper insight into the mechanisms of the human mind and the ways in which we cope with internal conflicts and stressors

A Few Final Words on Repression

A Chinese sage said “reading prescriptions does not make one well.” While repression has some serious side affects, bringing to light repressed information does not magically heal the wounded. In many cases, if the only thing we do is bring to light memories and feelings we wish to forget, we will only cause more harm.

Healthy adaptation depends on what we do with the knowledge. Do we use it to motivate growth by solving recurring problems in our lives, or do we use it to seek to critically criticize ourselves of others? Information is only as good as what we do with it.

References:

Boag, S. ( 2020). Reflective Awareness, Repression, and the Cognitive Unconscious. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 37(1), 18-27. DOI: 10.1037/pap0000276

Cherry, Kendra, ( 2022). What is Repression? Verywellmind. Published 3-1-2022. Accessed 9-6-2022.

Furnham, A., Lay, A., & , ( 2016). Repressive Coping and Theories about Psychotherapy. Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy. DOI: 10.4172/2161-0487.1000283

Freud, Anna ( 1937). The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense. ​Routledge; 1st edition.

Freud, Sigmund ( 1914) On Narcissism: An Introduction.

Freud, Sigmund ( 1923). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66.

Freud, Sigmund ( 1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. GENERAL PRESS; 1st edition.

Fromm, Erich ( 2013). The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Open Road Media; 1st edition

Greenberg, Leslie S. ( 2015). Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings.  American Psychological Association; 2nd edition.

Jacobson, E. ( 1957). Denial and Repression. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 5(1), 61-92. DOI: 10.1177/000306515700500102

May, Rollo (1981/ 1999). Freedom and Destiny. W. W. Norton & Company.

Mund, M., & Mitte, K. ( 2012). The Costs of Repression: A Meta-Analysis on the Relation Between Repressive Coping and Somatic Diseases. Health Psychology, 31(5), 640-649. DOI: 10.1037/a0026257

​Murphy, T. Franklin ( 2021) Defense Mechanisms. Psychology Fanatic. Published 2-4-2021. Accessed 9-6-2022.

Murphy, T. Franklin ( 2021a) Diathesis Stress Model. Psychology Fanatic. Published 9-7-2021. Accessed 9-8-2022.

Murphy, T. Franklin ( 2022) Window of Tolerance. Psychology Fanatic. Published 4-21-2022. Accessed 9-8-2022.

Myers, L., & Brewin, C. ( 1996). Illusions of well‐being and the repressive coping style. British Journal of Social Psychology, 35(4). DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.1996.tb01107.x

Nozick, Robert ( 1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books.

Patel, J., Patel, P. ( 2019). Consequences of Repression of Emotion: Physical Health, Mental Health and General Well Being. International Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research. DOI: 10.14302/issn.2574-612x.ijpr-18-2564

Phipps, S., & Srivastava, D. ( 1997). Repressive Adaptation in Children With Cancer. Health Psychology, 16(6), 521-528. DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.16.6.521

Prasertsri N, Holden J, Keefe FJ, Wilkie DJ. ( 2011). Repressive coping style: Relationships with depression, pain, and pain coping strategies in lung cancer outpatients. Lung Cancer. 71(2):235-240.

Vaillant, George E. ( 1998) Adaptations to Life. Harvard University Press; Reprint edition.

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