Internationale Zeitschrift für Aertzliche Psychoanalyse

Repression. Sigmund Freud.

Is Incendiarism an Archaic Attempt at Sublimation? Oscar Pfister.

Repression.— It may happen that an instinctive craving meets with resistances which render it ineffective. The result is repression—a concept difficult to understand from a theoretical point of view, for it might appear that the craving was avoided for the reason that its satisfaction would be attended by displeasure or pain. This would involve a contradiction because the goal of all instinctive craving is pleasure. The real condition, revealed by psychoanalysis, is that the satisfaction of the craving in itself would have been both possible and pleasurable had it not come into conflict with other tendencies and principles in the ego. Repression is not a primitive defense mechanism and only arises subsequent to the developmental period when the unconscious activities have been distinctly separated from the conscious, the process- consisting essentially in the exclusion of the censored craving from consciousness. Two stages of repression may be assumed—an original phase, on the one hand, in which the entrance into consciousness of the psychic representation of the craving is barred, resulting by means of peculiar unconscious processes in fixation, and, on the other, the repression properly so-called, through which the psychic derivatives and associations of the craving are repulsed. Only the relation to consciousness being disturbed, the craving itself continues to exist, to organize, to form associations, constantly gathering energy by summation through non-satisfaction and finally resulting in extreme expressions and outbursts of appalling form. Nor does repression exclude from consciousness all the derivatives of the originally repressed craving. It works in a highly individual manner and each descendant meets with its own particular fate. A shade more or less of disguise decides the reception or rejection of the entire association. Indeed the goals striven