The evolution of two psychoanalytic words
Sunday, October 4, 2009 at 7:54PM I've been thinking recently about "repression," and "projection" and how they've entered into contemporary talk and taken on interesting new meanings. Freud used the word "repression" to describe the involuntary process of excluding unacceptable impulses from consciousness. He used the word "projection" to describe one way people do this -- by disavowing these impulses and ascribing them to another person. In certain psychoanalytic circles, people still try to use these words in a neutral, clinical way, but in ordinary circles they have a blaming feel. When we call someone "repressed," we hold him responsible. The suggestion is that a repressed person somehow /chooses/ not to be aware of something that would make him more spontaneous and alive if he would just loosen up a little. The unintentional nature of repression is just an annoying aspect of a process that we see as fundamentally intentional. How can repression be intentional and also a little bit unintentional? It seems impossible, yet this is clearly how we view it.
"You're projecting" has an even more blatantly accusatory ring to it. The word "project" derives from the Latin "pro-" meaning "forward" and "jacere" "to throw" -- literally, "to throw forward." Although Freud et al described "projection" as an unconscious process, its roots suggest otherwise, and its contemporary meaning has returned to thoe roots. As with "repression," the word continues to be haunted by Freud's "unconscious" reformulation. This makes the accusation of projection all the more frustrating. The phase "you're just projecting" has a mind-bending, catch-22ish sting to it. One projects deliberately but also without meaning to -- so denial is futile.
Freud's structural model of the mind was a little like the Pagan model of the heavens, consisting of several anthropomorphic entities -- Id, Ego and Super Ego -- battling it out and producing irrational behavior in their human subjects. It makes sense that opposing motives will co-exist in a mind conceived as a territory ruled by opposing forces. The problem is that most of us now are monotheists when it comes to the mind. We believe in a unitary self. How does a unitary self exclude information from itself? The answer is that the unitary self is multi-dimensional, much like a sub-atomic particle, which behaves simultaneously like a particle and a wave. When we speak of projection and repression now -- we see these phenomena less as a battle between forces of exclusion and forces of awareness than as dual states of being, where we both know and don't know simultaneously. Clinicians have struggled to find new phrases to capture this paradox. British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has coined the phrase the "unthought known." Robert Stolorow speaks of the "preconscious." Daniel Stern prefers the term "implicit knowing." But nothing captures better the feeling of acting with knowledge and yet without as when we misuse the words "repression" and "projection" in ordinary speech.
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repression is the Memory inhibition, the ability to filter irrelevant memories from attempts to recall.
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