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THE WORD "DEFENSE" WAS FIRST USED BY FREUD in his (1894) paper,
The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence." There he said, "For reasons which will soon be evident, I shall call this form 'defence hysteria', using the name to distinguish it from hypnoid hysteria and retention hysteria
(p. 47). The reason for this usage — "soon to be evident"— is elaborated as the designation of the ego's response to "incompatible ideas";
the patients can recollect as precisely as could be desired their efforts at defence, their intention of 'pushing the thing away', of not thinking of it, of suppressing it
(p. 47). The linked concept "repression" had been introduced a year earlier in the "Preliminary Communication" (Breuer and Freud, 1893), where in talking of the memories of psychic traumata that had not been sufficiently abreacted, among the reasons given is that
it was a question of things which the patient wished to forget, and therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious thought and inhibited and suppressed
(p. 10).
As many authors have pointed out, including Anna Freud (1936), Freud then used "defense" and "repression" interchangeably, and at times, confusingly, until he undertook, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, to clearly differentiate them and to establish what has been since then, the accepted usage. Freud (1926) said: