Repression, Thought and Affect

Why do patients come to analysis in the first place? Sometimes they are overwhelmed by the power of a particular affect, be it depression, anxiety or guilt, without knowing why they feel this way. They may experience aches and pains dismissed by the medical profession as psychosomatic, or diagnosed as stress-related. Or they may be haunted by nonsensical but nonetheless frightening thoughts. In the case of neurotic patients, diagnosed thus through the important ‘preliminary conversations’ that take place face to face between analyst and patient, it is by understanding the role of repression that the missing cause of particular thoughts and affects can be discovered.

In psychosis there is, properly speaking, no unconscious at all, since the unconscious is the result of repression. In the neurotic, however, the motor force of repression leads, as Freud said, according to Fink (whose work I am paraphrasing here) ‘to a separate inscription or recording of a perception or a thought that once passed or flashed through one’s mind’. Repression happens through the acceptance or affirmation of a particular reality (a witnessed scene, for example) that is then pushed away. Whereas the psychotic excludes out the reality in question, never affirming or admitting it, the neurotic has always already accepted it, albeit attempting thereafter to push it out of his or her consciousness.

‘What is essential in repression … is not that affect is suppressed, but that it is displaced and misrecognisable’, writes Lacan. The analyst takes the patient’s symptoms as ‘proof’ of repression because, as Lacan says, ‘the repressed and the return of the repressed are one and the same’. The repressed idea is the same idea that reveals itself in unconscious formations such as bungled actions (‘accidentally’ staining a dining table) or particular slips.

The repressed can return as a ‘conversion symptom’ – that is, as it is expressed in the body, for example, in a convulsive movement of the arm or in the contents of one’s thoughts. Hysterics will typically experience rapidly changing physical symptoms of this kind. But the repressed can also return in the compulsive, disturbing thoughts that characterise obsession. .

But there can be no absolute distinction between hysteria and obsession in these terms since, in psychoanalysis body and mind exist in a single economy. For Lacan, it is one that expresses itself by means of linguistically expressed thoughts. ‘The first thing to say about the unconscious … is what Freud says about it: it consists of thoughts’, he writes. Even the body, he argues, is overwritten with signifiers – the symptom always takes the role of a language [langue], insofar as it expresses repression.

Fink gives the following example from Freud:

… Anna O. […] developed an occasional stiffening of her right arm, because it was that arm that refused to protect her father when she believed (in a ‘waking dream’) that he was being threatened by a snake. In other words, her physical, bodily symptom spoke of’ a relationship to her father and a possible death wish she had toward him that she was loath to admit to herself.

Thus conversion symptoms, which are extremely various, must be understood psychosomatically as they are part of a language through which the unconscious addresses us. The unconscious is a language, says Lacan, which, through analysis, the analysand must learn how to read.

Here, we might recall Freud, for whom dreams were symptoms which would permit of an interpretation that would uncover their true significance by clarifying the associative links which led to them. The manifest dream, that is, the way it is remembered and recounted by the patient, conceals the true, latent meaning of the dream because of the self-censoring desires of the supergo.

For Freud, it was necessary to understand the way in which the ostensible contents of the dream attest to the play of latent desires. This is what he called the dreamwork, that is, the way in which latent thoughts operated according to prelogical ways of thinking. In what Freud calls condensation, for example, latent dream thoughts are combined into a single manifest element. In displacement, an apparently innocuous detail in the dream can become highly significant, and vice versa. Plastic representation sees important people in the dreamer’s life being replaced through a stock of common symptoms (the king = the father, for example).

Crucially, the manifest and latent content of dreams are described by Freud as two different languages. For Lacan, the unconscious is a language; it always involves linguistic symbolisation. In this sense, repression concerns a perception or affect that has been symbolised in some way. The unconscious consists of thoughts that are expressed or formulated in words.

Note, then, that what is repressed, says Lacan, ‘is neither perception nor affect, but the thoughts pertaining to perceptions, the thoughts to which affect is attached‘. Repression works by actively severing affect and thought. Thus, affect can remain when the thought to which it is linked is repressed. This is often what is found in hysteria, where the affect persists when thought has been ‘forgotten’. In obsession, something similar may occur, where the thought – as it pertains, for example, to a childhood event – is available to consciousness, but the affect is not.

In both cases, the link between thought and affect, at the time of they were originally found together, has been broken. The analyst will attempt to allow the patient to transfer the missing affect onto the analytic relationship. It is by playing the part of the man or woman without qualities that the psychoanalyst can bring the patient to project the dissociated affect upon him or her, however negative this projection might be (the analyst as toreador).

This is how the repressed can be managed, allowing it to come forward as it is combined with other, related thoughts in the analytic session. The repressed will be revealed as such, in the analytic session, and be worked through by the analysand so that it no longer exerts a painful claim on their lives in the present.