Knowra Repression Repression Repression is a proposed defense process in which distressing thoughts, wishes, or memories are kept outside conscious awareness. It is a central idea in psychoanalytic theory.
Unconscious mind : Mental processes and contents that are not present in conscious awareness. Repression is proposed to keep certain contents in this broader domain.
Sigmund Freud : An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and developed theories of unconscious mental life. Freud made repression a central explanation of unconscious conflict.
Suppression : The deliberate decision to avoid thinking about a troubling idea or feeling. Unlike repression, suppression involves conscious intention.
Psychodynamic therapy : A form of psychotherapy that explores unconscious processes, emotional conflict, and recurring relational patterns. Therapists in this tradition may examine defenses such as repression.
Psychological defense mechanism : An unconscious psychological process that reduces or manages distress. Repression is one proposed defense mechanism within this broader class.
Psychoanalysis : A theory and therapeutic tradition focused on unconscious processes, conflict, and early experience. Repression became one of psychoanalysis’s defining concepts.
Dissociation : A disruption in the integration of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception. Dissociation describes disruptions of integration, not necessarily unconscious exclusion of a wish.
Recovered-memory therapy : Therapeutic practices that seek to recover memories believed to have been inaccessible or forgotten. Claims about repression influenced efforts to uncover memories, amid disputes about memory accuracy.
Return of the repressed : The psychoanalytic idea that excluded mental contents reappear indirectly in symptoms, dreams, or behavior. It describes how repressed material may influence experience without becoming directly conscious.
Studies on Hysteria : An 1895 book by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud on hysteria and the talking cure. The book helped establish the link between inaccessible memories and symptoms.
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