Dissociation, Repression, and Return. The Thirty-Year Arc of the Concept of Defence in Freud and Towards Contemporary Psychoanalysis*

The early Freud recognised a wide range of defences. Between 1894 and 1926, the only defence is repression. Breuer differentiates between splitting of the mind and splitting of consciousness. The former concerns the structure while the latter concerns the psychic content. Freud went on make dissociation coincide with repression by giving importance only to the splitting of consciousness, while for Breuer hysteria is founded on “splitting of the psyche.” In 1926 he proposed an enlargement of the field of defences in addition to repression with the recognition of particular defences in phobias and obsessions. This broadening retrieves Janet's concept of dissociation as ‘loss of the capacity for synthesis,’ which for the early Freud and Breuer occurred in hypnoid states and in the suspension of associative capacities. Contemporary psychoanalysis takes up Freud's initial concept of defences. It retrieves the concept of dissociation considered both as repression and as the inability to integrate experience caused by blocking the fluid dissociative dynamic between multiple states of the Self. Using clinical examples it is therefore proposed that the analytic process simultaneously includes positions of repression as well as positions of dissociation considered as suspension of the patient's and analyst's integrative capacities. Repression concerns the avoidance of conflict, while dissociation suspends the process of access to conflict.