On Primal Repression

In Freudian metapsychology the concept of primal repression is undoubtedly among the most complex and obscure and has not been given the expected space and development in subsequent analytic thought. Probably one of the main reasons for this is the difficulty in being able to imagine this element in the primary psychic apparatus in which Freud had placed it, that is, in the mysterious leap between body and mind, and, therefore, in a nebulous and not easily investigated sphere.

The concept of repression (secondary repression or post-repression) instead, in the meaning of adaptive mature defence, perceived though as conceptually distant from primal repression, has enjoyed widespread attention, even in the language of the everyday. Yet Freud, when writing of repression, always establishes a connection between a first moment of it (primal repression) and repression proper, or the «second phase» of repression.

It was probably also Freud's interchangeable use, in his early works, of the term repression (Verdrängung) as a substitute for the term defence (Abwehr) that led to the prevalence of the defensive and secondary aspect of the act of repression. This trend was then reinforced in post-Freudian psychoanalysis by Ego Psychology, which, in paying greater attention to the ego as a structure and to its functions, reaffirmed the idea of a psychic apparatus seen mainly in its defensive function against anxiety. And when, as in the Kleinian model, early functioning was more directly investigated, on the one hand the use of a different term was preferred — such as the concept of «unconscious phantasy» (Isaacs, 1948) — while, on the other, attention was for the most part focused on the primitive defences.

The result was that repression (Verdrängung) was placed among the secondary neurotic adult defences and primal repression (Urverdrängung) was relegated to the attic of old psychoanalytic relics of which all history and meaning has been almost lost.

Yet Freud never stopped referrin