Repression, Accessibility, and the Translation of Private Experience

This article explores two underlying assumptions of the structural deficits approach to psychoanalytic psychotherapy (i.g., Gedo, 1984; Kohut, 1984); (a) that the analyst must gain a knowledge of the patient's intrapsychic capacities through empathetic processes, and (b) that inaccessible memories are split off or repressed from expression within the analytic hour because the patient lacks the adecuate intrapsychic capacities and structures to tolerate their associated affects. These assumptions are discussed within the context of contemporary views of multiple modes or forms of memory, repression, and the question of accessibility. It is concluded that the mechanisms of repression can operate at the stages of initial encoding as well as the retrieval stage and, consequently, that traumatic memory contents appearing to be relatively inaccessible may be so (a) because of active repression at the time of retrieval or (b) because a minimal number of associative connections have been established with other contents in memory. Thus, a greater portion of private experience is preconsciously available than would be suggested by the deficits approach.