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The word 'repression' is inevitably and indissolubly linked with the name of Freud. It could hardly be otherwise, indeed, since the concept of repression is in the first place, as Freud himself denoted it, the foundation stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests, 'the most essential part of it'.1 For it was Freud who, following a lead of Bernheim, first asserted that certain (pathogenic) memories 'were in the possession of the patient, ready to emerge and form associations with his other mental content, but hindered from doing so, hindered from becoming conscious and compelled to remain in the unconscious, by some sort of a force… These same forces, which, as resistances, opposed the emergence of the forgotten ideas into consciousness, must themselves have in the first place caused the forgetting, and repressed from consciousness the pathogenic experiences. I called this hypothetical process "repression"', Freud continues, 'and considered that it was proved by the undeniable existence of resistance'.2 Thus it was that, on the basis of a type of clinical observation which he was the first to make, Freud arrived at a conception—namely, that of repression—which he thought of, quite naturally, as having come to him independently of any other source, one that he supposed to be entirely his own1, a doctrine which was the outcome of psychoanalytic work and which could not have been formulated before the time of psychoanalytic research.3
Like other scientific pioneers, however, Freud had his precursors. Among these, and in respect of this very concept of repression which with good reason Freud had considered peculiarly