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Sigmund Freud And Psychological Repression

Decent Essays

Freud's first concept of repression was an intentional effort to avoid upsetting experiences from entering consciousness. “Repression is Psychological repression, or simply repression, is the psychological attempt made by an individual to direct one's own desires and impulses toward pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious.” (Boag, 2012) This paper will be a brief literature review for the intervention proposal. This paper will touch upon both sides of repression, is it real or not, a research question and studies upon the research question. There has been debate on whether repression exists. The debate mainly focuses on if an individual remembers or forget trauma. “Sigmund Freud observed repression as the foundation stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests.” (Rofe, 2008) However, notwithstanding incredible research efforts, the psychology community is divided concerning the legitimacy of this idea. Nonetheless, in the same side with unforgiving criticism against psychoanalysis overall, several investigators request the legitimacy of repression, appealing that it needs to be abandoned.
Repression became an experimental fact that is at once apparent and challenging. “Fragmented clinical and laboratory traditions and disputed terminology have resulted in a Babel of misunderstandings in which false distinctions are imposed and necessary distinctions not drawn.” (Erdelvi, 2007)

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