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In this article, I will try to describe the course of study and clinical activity that have led me to a reconsideration of repression and splitting, through which I have constructed a representation that seems useful to me and that I therefore hope may be of use to others as well.
It is not easy for me to describe this trajectory. I reread the literature; I reread the classics, returning time and again to Freud, and I noticed myself getting farther away from my topic and then reapproaching it from another angle. These opening remarks are not based on a desire to exhibit my psychic headaches but, on the contrary, on an attempt to keep firmly in mind that even our theoretical thinking may be subject to unconscious psychic actions that to a great extent determine the conscious results. We all know it, but we tend to repress (here is one of the mechanisms) the complexity of this situation.
I have always considered repression to be an ingenious theoretical construction against which, therefore, the major resistances are aimed, both at the level of the so-called well-educated public — who continually tend to transform repression into forgetting — and at the level of professionals, who little by little, it seems to me, have oscillated between two opposing attitudes: on the one hand, they consider repression an unconscious defence mechanism of the ego that is almost expected, practically easy to confront (while God alone knows how much trouble I have taken, in my long career, to understand that something of repression was surfacing in myself, and then tried to understand or guess what it was about), and, on the other hand, considering it to be the only great defence mechanism. The flexible and complex psychic instrument of the same name — repression — conceived by Freud in his famous essay on metapsychology (1915b) and then elaborated in his essay on The Unconscious (1915c), gets reduced in one way or another to a caricature.
And now, in writing, when I come up against somethi