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Defenses

Repression

Repression is not knowing what you know. A wish, a thought, or a memory that would stir up conflict stays out of conscious awareness. The feeling attached to it often doesn’t go anywhere, though. You may feel uneasy, tearful, or low without being able to say why. The idea goes missing; the emotion stays.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by being unable to remember or be cognitively aware of disturbing wishes, feelings, thoughts or experiences” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). The emotional elements are “clearly present and experienced,” while the thoughts that would explain them remain outside consciousness.

Repression protects against knowing something about our own experience that would be too threatening to face, such as a wish we would be ashamed of or a memory that hurts. The price is feelings that seem to come from nowhere, vagueness about certain subjects, and gaps where memories should be.

Where It Sits

Repression belongs to Level 5, the Neurotic Defense Level, within the Neurotic Defensive Category, which the DMRS describes as the “middle-range of adaptiveness.” Neurotic defenses keep a wish, thought, or motive out of awareness while still letting the person feel the emotions that go with it. The blocked idea shows itself only indirectly, through what the DMRS calls “a series of anomalous clues.”

The DMRS divides this level into two groups that are scored separately. Repression and dissociation form the hysterical group (Level 5a); reaction formation and displacement form the “other neurotic” group (Level 5b). The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale placed repression at a broader “mental inhibitions” level that also took in the obsessional defenses; Perry’s scales separate the two.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify repression:

Examples

The smell of burned pastry

Freud treated Lucie R., an English governess in the household of a widowed factory superintendent near Vienna, who was low in spirits and kept smelling burned pastry. Freud traced the smell to a scene in which the children she cared for let some pastry burn while she was thinking of leaving the household. He came to believe she had fallen in love with her employer and had pushed the feeling away. When he asked why she hadn’t told him, she answered: “But I did not know it, or rather, I did not wish to know it.” In a footnote, Freud wrote that he had never found a better description of “this peculiar state in which one knows something and at the same time does not know it.”

Sigmund Freud, “Miss Lucie R.,” in Breuer & Freud, Studies in Hysteria (1936), pp. 76–84

The forgotten painter

Traveling by carriage with a stranger, Freud tried to name the painter of the Last Judgment frescoes at Orvieto. “Signorelli” wouldn’t come. Instead, the names Botticelli and Boltraffio kept pushing in, though he knew both were wrong. Tracing his associations, he linked the lapse to a subject he had deliberately steered away from moments earlier, and to distressing news about a former patient that he hadn’t consciously recalled during the trip. His conclusion: “I wanted to forget something, I repressed something.” What went missing wasn’t the painful thought itself but a name that had become tied to it.

Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914), pp. 4–8

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Suppression
Suppression is deliberate and temporary: you choose to set a worry aside and can bring it back whenever you are ready, because it “is not forgotten.” Repression happens automatically, and the person can’t call the missing idea back at will.
Isolation of affects
The DMRS describes isolation as “the converse of repression, where the affect is retained but the idea is detached and unrecognized.” Someone using isolation can tell the whole story without feeling it; someone using repression feels it without knowing the story.
Denial
Denial refuses to acknowledge something others can plainly see, and the person is “blinded to both the ideational and emotional content of what is denied.” In repression, the emotion is still felt and often visible.
Ordinary forgetting
Everyone forgets names and details. Raters look for gaps in things that “would normally not be forgotten,” together with signs of unease around the topic.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count repression among their characteristic defenses:

By contrast, the schizoid style page notes that people with that style rarely rely on it.

History

Repression was central to psychoanalysis from the start. In Studies in Hysteria (1895), written with Josef Breuer, Freud concluded from cases like Lucie R.’s that in hysteria “some idea must intentionally be repressed from consciousness.” At this early stage he wrote as if the pushing away were partly deliberate. He later called the theory of repression “the main pillar upon which rests the edifice of psychoanalysis.”

Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (German 1936; English 1937) listed repression among the ego’s methods of defense and stressed how hard it is to observe directly: “The ego knows nothing of it; we are aware of it only subsequently, when it becomes apparent that something is missing.” George Vaillant later summed it up as “the opposite of isolation - feeling without thinking.”

Repression was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, which places it in the hysterical group at Level 5.

Weinberger, Schwartz, and Davidson (1979) described a “repressive coping style”: people who report little anxiety but score high on defensiveness. As Weber and colleagues (2021) summarize Weinberger’s early work and many later studies, such people tend to report low distress while showing high physiological arousal. In a memory experiment, Anderson and Green (2001) found that repeatedly trying to keep a memory out of awareness made it harder to recall later, and suggested that ordinary mental control processes “may provide a viable model for repression.” The concept has also been sharply contested, notably in the 1990s debates over whether memories of trauma that surface years later are accurate (Loftus, 1993).

Sources