Repression - Trauma - Neurosis

A couple of friends who are holidaying with a number of other people start arguing and completely lose their tempers. The next day, they put their differences to one side and behave as though nothing had happened so as not to cast a cloud over the group and ruin the holiday. That day, they share ...

Freud thought of repression as the basic ego defense, since it is only when repression is fragile or failing that other ego defenses come into play to reinforce and rescue it.

Treatment, argued Freud and Breuerrequires the patient to recall these repressed experiences into consciousness and confront them once and for all, leading to a sudden and dramatic outpouring of emotion ("catharsis") and the attainment of insight. In the course of treatment, the patient i...

Repressed material, though unconscious, is no less present, and can (and usually does) resurface in disturbing forms. As well as a lack of insight and understanding, the inability to process and come to terms with repressed material is associated with a range of p...

The mental operation of suppression is similar to repression but with one crucial difference, namely, the "forgetting" is conscious rather than unconscious. Thus, suppression is the conscious and often rational decision to put an uncom...

In psychoanalytic theory, ego defenses are unconscious processes that we deploy to diffuse the fear and anxiety that arise when who we think we are or who we think we should be (our conscious ‘superego’) comes into conflict with who we really are (our unconscious ‘id’).