The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20, 1951, No. 4: Adelaide McF. Johnson. 'Some Etiological Aspects of Repression, Guilt and Hostility.'

This paper attempts to re-evaluate the concepts of repression, restitution and hostility in the light of observations made by anthropologists and collaborative therapists working with parent and child on the relative importance of biological and environmental factors in early development.

In contradistinction to the 'classical' view that repression is a normal mechanism provoked by an innate antagonism between ego and id or a discrepancy between their rates of development (instinctual anxiety) it is suggested that it is a mechanism of adaptation to pathological environmental conditions and that 'the extent to which repression occurs is one index of the degree of departure from good health'.

The development of guilt and restitutive drives in children with cold, unloving parents is only explicable on the assumption that it is a realistic attempt to appease the source of gratification of minimal, primary needs. 'Our concept of the meaning of guilt should be expanded to the more inclusive view that guilt is a need for punishment in an urge to make reparation to a "needed object" rather than limiting the meaning to the common situation in which restitutive behaviour arises from parental love and the child's fear of losing it.'

'Hostile aggressiveness, as distinguished from biologically inherited aggressiveness, originates in the course of the infant's incorporation of the total maternal attitude, which includes the mother's own hostility.'