The Relationship of Repression to Reality Testing in Adult Women who Report Childhood Sexual and Physical Abuse

According to classical psychoanalytic theory, individuals use repression to block out unacceptable thoughts, feelings, ideas, or memories (Freud, 1915/1989). A further assumption inherent in this view is that the use of repression engenders problems in other domains of psychic functioning, specifically in the area of reality testing. That is, repression is seen as necessarily interfering with a full, conscious apprehension of reality. Hysterics, for example, as a consequence of their supposed repression of incestuous oepidal wishes, are said to suffer from defective reality testing and an inability to distinguish what is imagined and what has actually occurred. Issues related to the relationship between repression and reality testing have occupied a primary position in psychoanalysis since Freud began writing about the actual and fantasized history of abused women at the turn of the century (e.g., Masson, 1984). The primary aim of the present study is to examine the relationship between repression and two types of reality testing (perceptual distortions and dissociation) in a nonclinical sample of women who have reported experiences of childhood physical and/or sexual abuse.

Many contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers (e.g., Abend, 1982; Arlow, 1969; Stolorow & Atwood, 1989) contend that reality testing must be understood as occurring on a continuum; perceptions are always colored to a certain extent by fantasies and wishes. Hartman (1956) suggested that this process begins early in life—that every child's sense of reality is influenced by significant others, and that each child gets pleasure from adopting the “erroneous and biased views” of important figures in his or her life (p. 256).

If everyone's sense of even the most mundane daily reality is permeated