Repression has become an empirical fact that is at once obvious and problematic. Fragmented clinical and laboratory traditions and disputed terminology have resulted in a Babel of misunderstandings in which false distinctions are imposed (e.g., between repression and suppression) and necessary distinctions not drawn (e.g., between the mechanism and the use to which it is put, defense being just one). “Repression” was introduced by Herbart to designate the (nondefensive) inhibition of ideas by other ideas in their struggle for (...) consciousness. Freud adapted repression to the defensive inhibition of “unbearable” mental contents. Substantial experimental literatures on attentional biases, thought avoidance, interference, and intentional forgetting exist, the oldest prototype being the work of Ebbinghaus, who showed that intentional avoidance of memories results in their progressive forgetting over time. It has now become clear, as clinicians had claimed, that the inaccessible materials are often available and emerge indirectly (e.g., procedurally, implicitly). It is also now established that the Ebbinghaus retention function can be partly reversed, with resulting increases of conscious memory over time (hypermnesia). Freud's clinical experience revealed early on that exclusion from consciousness was effected not just by simple repression (inhibition) but also by a variety of distorting techniques, some deployed to degrade latent contents (denial), all eventually subsumed under the rubric of defense mechanisms (“repression in the widest sense”). Freudian and Bartlettian distortions are essentially the same, even in name, except for motive (cognitive vs. emotional), and experimentally induced false memories and other “memory illusions” are laboratory analogs of self-induced distortions. Key Words: avoidance; Bartlett; defense; denial; distortion; Ebbinghaus; false-memories; Freud; inhibition; repression; suppression. (shrink)

In previous research Libet discovered that a critical time period for neural activation is necessary in order for a stimulus to become conscious. This necessary time period varies from subject to subject. In this current study, six subjects for whom the time for neural activation of consciousness had been previously determined were administered a battery of psychological tests on the basis of which ratings were made of degree of repressiveness. As hypothesized, repressive subjects had a longer critical time period for (...) neural activation of consciousness, suggesting the possibility that this neurophysiological time factor is a necessary condition for the development of repression. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 335-342 [Access article in PDF] Psychoanalysis as a Hybrid of Religion and Science Quinton Deeley Keywords Freud, psychoanalysis, religion, science, evolution Introduction De Block's paper, "Freud as an Evolutionary Psychiatrist," discusses Freud's writ-ings—including a recently discovered paper on the evolution of psychopathology—to establish the Freudian "philosophy of man" that human beings are "ill to the core" (i.e., that mental illness is an inevitable (...) byproduct of human psychological processes). This perspective is then used as a basis for proposing a way in which psychoanalysis can be integrated with contemporary evolutionary psychology. However, this undertaking raises fundamental questions about psychoanalysis itself, which are addressed in this commentary. First, to what extent is a systematic theoretical unity imposed on, rather than discovered in, Freud's writings? Also, has De Block succeeded in grounding the Freudian philosophy of man in evolutionary theory, and how is this ambition affected by general questions about the scientific status and evidence for psychoanalytic conceptions? Further, if there is only limited experimental evidence for psychoanalytic concepts, how are claims to knowledge justified in psychoanalytic discourse, and how does this relate to the forms of epistemic justification found in religion and science? Finally, is psychoanalysis closer to religious or scientific discourse, and if it combines features of both, what kind of activity is it? The Exposition of the Freudian Philosophical Project The key claim of De Block's paper is that any evolutionary psychology faithful to Freud's account of human nature must be constrained by a fundamental premise: the psychological organization of human beings is such that "there is a quantitative, but not a structural, difference between psychiatric patients and so-called healthy or normal individuals" (2005, 323). From De Block's perspective, this reflects the Freudian perspective that the normal operation of psychological processes inevitably results in some degree of mental distress: "every repression produces symptoms, every defense mechanism produces more suffering than is strictly necessary" (2005, 321). As a result, "when Freud writes that there is only a gradual difference between neurotics and normals, he does not mean the normals are non-neurotic, but only that they suffer less under their neurosis" (2005, 318). This Freudian perspective is variously summarized throughout the paper; for example, "we think there is only one underlying motive of Freud's research, which [End Page 335] could also function as a cornerstone of a 'Freudian' philosophy. This underlying motive is the intuition that there is no substantial difference between the so-called normal human being and the mentally insane" (2005, 315).De Block's exposition of the Freudian account of human nature also emphasizes the doctrine of psychosexuality: "the Freudian philosophy of man presumes primarily that every human being has to react in some way of another to sexual problems" (2005, 317). One of the problems confronting any expositor of Freud is the fact that his voluminous writings show considerable development in his thought. This heterogeneity raises the question of the extent to which the coherence of Freudian theory as a systematic whole is imposed by expositors, rather than lying in the corpus itself. De Block's approach to this heterogeneity is to extract different kinds of relations between sexuality and psychopathology from Freud's writings (e.g., neurosis and the Oedipal instincts, psychosis and narcissism), and then to argue that they explain Freud's interest in less obviously sexual aspects of mind, behavior, and society. As De Block comments after his exegesis of different connections between sexuality and psychopathology: but probably, he [Freud] only meant that in neurosis, people wrestle first and foremost with love, in perversion with sex and violence, and in psychosis with identity and issues related to identity, such as death and "the meaning of life." At least, such an interpretation can explain why Freud—in some of his works—recognized the importance of problems like aggression, love, and death for the human psyche and human psychopathology...; he nevertheless refused to modify the primacy of sexuality in psychopathology. (2005, X) Whether all of Freud's explanations of psychological phenomena involve... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Birth of the Psychoanalytic Hero:Freud's Platonic LeonardoJohn FarrellThough the intellectual force of Freudian psychoanalysis grows weaker and weaker with time, its importance for the understanding of twentieth-century intellectual culture only increases. Freud made psychology a key ingredient in the century's conception of its own uniqueness and modernity. He claimed to initiate a decisive break with the past, but he also claimed to recover the past, indeed all of (...) human behavior, on new, scientific grounds. What Freud proposed was not just a new way of thinking about psychology but a new psychology, one that would permit unprecedentedly intrepid investigation of the past and the unconscious sources of its ways of thinking. But whereas Freud hoped to give us a new psychology of knowledge, what he did was to reintroduce one of the oldest psychologies of knowledge in a moderately disguised form. I will attempt to show this and assess the implications through a close examination of Freud's treatment of Leonardo da Vinci, a man he considered one of the great forerunners of the modern intellect.Psychoanalysis is both a theory of the psyche and a scientific movement. Its dual nature makes it almost a unique element in the culture of modern science. Freud and his followers repudiated the separation between institutional affiliation and intellectual commitment that had been carried down from seventeenth-century England. The original form of the psychoanalytic movement was a throwback to that of the ancient philosophical academies.1 Almost from the beginning of psychoanalysis its founders had recourse to a canon of dogma with the primacy of the libido at its center. Adherence to this canon, and the rituals of initiation and training surrounding it, became the basis for [End Page 233] an exclusive intellectual and professional commitment that separated initiates from the professional community at large.It is well known that the founders of psychoanalysis made use of psychoanalytic theory to explain the movement's adversarial relationship with the outside world. The doctrine of resistance to the libido allowed Freudians to interpret the hidden motives of anyone who might disagree with them. The ire of critics could be cited as proof of the intensity of unconscious repression applied to sexuality, the incredulity of unbelievers as evidence of an unwillingness to endure the wounds to human narcissism exacted by the Freudian system, and even slips of the tongue could be turned against unwitting opponents. The fact that psychoanalysis was greeted with hostility in some quarters was taken to prove that the universal tendency of humankind was to resist its teachings, and the lapsing away of prominent disciples illustrated the difficulty of living with these hard truths. Heretics were pitied as weaklings unable to face up to the power of the unconscious, unable to keep themselves from disguising it with it some pale reflection of the ego. And so the embattled history of psychoanalysis became part of the empirical evidence of its validity in a way that could never have occurred with a theory generated in the normal research environment. The doctrine of resistance seemed to have been designed as much for polemical as for analytic purposes. Like the monster in Forbidden Planet, the fifties Freudian fairy tale, the more psychoanalysis was resisted, the more it grew. The self-confirming value that could be derived from the history of the movement as a cultural scandal even led Freud to exaggerate the hostility of his early reception and the intensity of his early isolation. With the doctrine of resistance, Freud had imported into science the style of the avant-garde, which feeds upon rejection, outrage, and the breach of bourgeois manners. The concept of "resistance to psychoanalysis" is still in use among psychoanalysts today.The argument from resistance, however useful it may have been as a defense mechanism of psychoanalytic rhetoric, leads to a troubling theoretical question: If the truths of psychoanalysis are naturally repugnant to humankind, so much so that we have a powerful constitutional tendency to hide them from ourselves, what could have liberated Freud and his followers to unearth these unwelcome secrets from the depths of their own psyches? If we take the "resistance to psychoanalysis" as a... (shrink)

Sublimation is usually defined as a defense-mechanism that desexualizes the sexual instincts. This desexualization then results in socio-cultural activities and psychic health. That means that sublimation is a crucial concept for psychoanalytic thinking, because it seems to connect the Freudian metapsychology with both applied psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy. However, in this article I argue that within Freud's theory sublimation is an empty and redundant concept. It is a redundant concept as far as it 'explains' the socio-cultural tendencies of (...) human beings, since these tendencies can be easily understood as the outcome of other defense-mechanisms, such as repression and identification. For that matter, Freud's only example of the sublimation process — found in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood — is in fact no sublimation, but a classic example of repression followed by symptom-formation. Secondly 'sublimation' is an empty concept with regard to the psychoanalytic therapy, because in that context it is used to explain something that simply never happens, at least according to Freud, namely a perfect recovery and a completely 'terminable' analysis. (shrink)