5. Vision, the World of the Eye, and Seeing without the Eye*

Freud's ideas about repression have made such an impact that it is surprising to find large areas of human life almost untouched by this theory. This applies, among other fields, to sensory perception. Occasionally, to be fair, the importance of repression for abnormal processes in the field of sensory perception has been stressed, yet nobody has ever said that perception without repression is impossible. We are only able to see, hear, smell, taste, touch because we are able to repress the enormous wealth of stimuli which meet the senses in favour of certain small fractions of them. The process of seeing illustrates this well.

The tool of vision, the eye, is already structured to meet the requirements of repression. The iris restricts the picture (field of vision) on its own. Yet the movements of the eye partially cancel out this nature-given narrowing-down, though only by supplying a succession of perceptions. The structural changes of the iris, which dilates or contracts the pupil, could be seen as natural possibilities of repression. The pupils contract, when strong light falls on the eye so that everything becomes too bright, or when the axes of vision are made to converge in order to look at objects close by and cancel out distant objects. Similarly the retina can be seen as an organ for repression. Seeing essentially depends on the yellow spot; yet the anatomic distribution of vision cells and the changes in the visual purple contained in the retina prove that the range of things seen is much wider than what the yellow spot perceives. Images forming outside the yellow spot are easily repressed more or less completely. Repression during the act of seeing is best understood