Repression

Repression is an unconscious form of motivated forgetting Opens in new window involving the suppression of memories that we do not want to retrieve, often because they are in some way troubling or unpleasant.

Take a moment and scan over the events of the last few years of your life. What kinds of things most easily come to mind? Many people remember happy, positive events better than disappointments and irritations (Moore & Zoellner, 2007).

For example, the forgetting of past failures, upsetting childhood events, the names of people you dislike, or appointments you don’t want to keep are all acts of repression.

This forgetting is an active process; repression has to be continually exerted to prevent the taboo material from reaching consciousness.

Were it not for repression, Freud Opens in new window believed, we would be flooded with overwhelming anxiety whenever such threatening material entered consciousness.

Repression, in this way, is not simple forgetting Opens in new window; the repressed contents do not disappear but remain in the unconscious mind, hidden from awareness.

One of the really fundamental aspects of the concept is that anything that is repressed is not lost. It is only submerged below the level at which, under ordinary circumstances, the individual can voluntarily recall it.

Furthermore, it does not take relearning to reactivate this material. If the source of conflict is removed, the repressed memory will recover without specific practice.

It is this feature of potential recovery that is of critical importance to the role of repression in forgetting Opens in new window. Unfortunately, the experimental evidence on repression is very weak.

This is partly because repression is not operationally definable and partly because it is not easy to simulate the severe emotional stress necessary for repression in an experimental situation. Nor is it ethical to do so! However, several workers have attempted to produce repression in memory experiments.

For example, Zeller (1951) claimed to associate the retention of nonsense syllables with the threat of personal failure, when he introduced an experimental paradigm that is frequently cited as evidence for repression.

In Zeller’s experiment, subjects are required to learn a list of words; then half of them are ‘ego threatened’ by forcing them to fail on another task or giving them negative (insulting) personality feedback, while control subjects are not so threatened.

A subsequent recall test reveals that the threatened group cannot remember the words as well as the controls. /

The dynamic interpretation of this finding is that anxiety induced by the threat procedure has resulted in repression of the word list. However, a study by Holmes (1972) tested the alternative hypothesis that the memory loss in this situation is due to interference Opens in new window rather than repression.

He added to Zeller’s paradigm a third group of subjects given ‘ego-enhancing’ personality feedback (an extremely flattering description of themselves supposedly based on the results of personality tests).

This treatment, which can be presumed to be distracting without invoking anxiety was found to be equally detrimental to verbal recall. Holmes notes that, ‘this leaves the concept of repression in a precarious position with respect to the necessary experimental verification’.

Separating Repression from Suppression

People prone to repression tend to be extremely sensitive to emotional events. As a result, they use repression to protect themselves from threatening thoughts.

A student once asked ‘If I try to forget a test I failed, am I repressing it?’

The answer is “No”. Repression can be distinguished from suppression, an active, conscious attempt to put something out of the mind.

By not thinking about the test, you have merely suppressed a memory. If you choose to, you can remember the test. Clinicians consider true repression an unconscious event. When a memory is repressed we may be unaware that forgetting has even occurred.

Although some psychologists have disputed whether repression actually exists, evidence suggests that we can choose to actively suppress upsetting memories (Anderson, 2001).

If you have experienced a painful emotional event, you will probably avoid all thoughts associated with it. This tends to keep cues out of the mind that could trigger a painful memory. In time, your active suppression of the memory may become true repression (Anderson & Green, 2001).