Freud: The Idea of Repression

Freud: The Idea of “Repression”

In the “Second Lecture” of Sigmund Freud he uses the concept of “repression”

and he gives the explanation of it as the origin of a lot of mental illness such as hysteria.

Freud associates the symptom to a will conflict. He defines it as a perversion of the will

because involuntarily an inhibited intention emerges. It is the premise of the dissociation.

Freud explains the hysteria through the repression mechanism with a comparative study.

First the subject is susceptible to pretend to elude the fulfillment of an unpleasant

obligation. The second, is referred a conception of the human being like whom cannot

dominate everything by himself; the subject’s ethical and other standards were the

repressing forces. In this essay, I disagree with Sigmund Freud theory of “repression”, He

doesn’t give a detail information of the causes of the mental disorders, and he doesn’t

gives enough examples to understand his theory.

I think that Freud’s explanation is inadequate to explain why people have mental

disorders. It is verified how the hypnosis is still used to obtain the revelation of the

significant origin of the symptoms of mental disorders. That’s the origin of the repressed

memory therapy that Freud discovered with his patients. Freud says “ Staring out from

the mechanism of cure, it now become possible to construct quite definite ideas of the

origin of the illness”. Of course there are a lot of mental illnesses that are known and

treated with the repressed memory therapy such as sexual abuse, however the large

number of the mental diseases not always “repression” is the cause of the ill.

Secondly, I believe The theory of unconsciously repressing the memory of

traumatic experiences is controversial. There is little scientific evidence to support either

the notion that traumatic experiences are typically unconsciously repressed or that

unconscious memories of traumatic events are significant causal factors in physical or

mental illness. Most people do not forget traumatic experiences unless they are rendered

unconscious at the time of the experience. Freud says “ in the form of resistance, were

now offering opposition to the forgotten material’s being made conscious” also says

”about the forgetting and must have pushed the pathogenic experiences in question out of

consciousness. I gave the name ‘repression’ … and