Problems in the concept of repression and proposals for their resolution

The authors of this paper accept the reality of the phenomenon of repression and consider that it alone explains many kinds of psychopathology. Nevertheless, the assumption in Freud's sketch of the mechanism of repression that the ego continually guards against the repressed impulse becoming conscious creates a logical problem. That would require that the ego remain aware of the repressed. A mental act becomes conscious only by being made the object of a second mental act, not through possessing intrinsic consciousness. Some barrier must be set up to prevent this second mental act. Freud's concept of primal repression is compared with Kleinian concepts of splitting and projection, which seem to avoid some of his difficulties. It is proposed that as a result of initial outburst of anxiety, neurological blockages are set up between the neural registrations of certain images of instinctual gratification and those other neural organisations that could register the occurrence of those images. The latter thus remain unknown, though still affecting behaviour. Neurological findings suggest that some such mechanism is possible.