REPRESSION: To block from awareness ideas or emotions that are painful.

        Example: The repression of the idea of death. Someday (fairly soon)
each one of us is not going to exist. This is one of the most painful ideas
imaginable. Yet we don't think of our own impending death too frequently.
The mechanism of repression works to keep this idea from entering into our
mind.

        The psychoanalytic idea of repression means that there is a great
going on within our minds that we don't know about. Painful ideas that we
cannot acknowledge become UNCONSCIOUS.

        The fact that an idea is repressed does not mean that it does not
impact upon our behavior. Person are capable of ACTING OUT ideas and
fantasies of which they are not aware.

        In dreams, unconscious material is articulated in the form of
visual images, though we tend to REPRESS (not be capable of remembering)
our dreams shortly after awakening. To recover unconscious ideas of which
we are not aware is one of the fundamental tasks of psychoanalysis.

Regards,

Richard Koenigsberg, Ph. D.