PROBLEMS IN THE CONCEPT OF REPRESSION AND PROPOSALS FOR THEIR RESOLUTION

The authors of this paper accept the reality of the phenomenon of repr ession and consider that it alone explains many kinds of psychopatholo gy. Nevertheless, the assumption in Freud's sketch of the mechanism of repression that the ego continually guards against the repressed impu lse becoming conscious creates a logical problem. That would require t hat the ego remain aware of the repressed. A mental act becomes consci ous only by being made the object of a second mental act, not through possessing intrinsic consciousness. Some barrier must be set up to pre vent this second mental act. Freud's concept of primal repression is c ompared with Kleinian concepts of splitting and projection, which seem to avoid some of his difficulties. It is proposed that as a result of initial outbursts of anxiety, neurological blockages are set up betwe en the neural registrations of certain images of instinctual gratifica tion and those other neural organisations that could register the occu rrence of those images. The latter thus remain unknown, though still a ffecting behaviour. Neurological findings suggest that some such mecha nism is possible.