Abstract
For some philosophers and thinkers (e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre), the repression theory of Sigmund Freud that posits a conscious ego and an unconscious id is an exercise in bad faith, a self-contradiction, and a metapsychological self-deception. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Freud’s account of censorship and repression is cognitively sound, coherent, and within the realm of practical possibility. Informed by the epistemological insight of Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan on the vis cogitava, as well as recent findings of non-conscious cognition in neuropsychological studies, I will express how unconscious-conscious processing via repression is possible.
Introduction
In the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (1915d), repression involves turning or blocking away mental contents of unacceptable drives (e.g., sexual drives, aggressive thoughts, painful memories, and objectionable wishes) to the conscious personality and preventing them from emerging into consciousness. For him, drives produce affects-laden ideas, such as shame, guilt, and sadness. In his early psychoanalytic theory, Freud described repression as a dissociation of affects (emotive energies) from ideas. Following this dissociation, memories representing affective drives would disappear into unconsciousness, while affects, through associations, would further transform, disguise, or distort into useful and acceptable conscious ideas. In his later psychoanalytic theory, Freud (1915d, 1915e) saw repression simply as the prevention of unpleasurable affects loaded with ideas from reaching consciousness. In both descriptions, repression serves as a defense mechanism of the ego, blocking affect-loaded memories in the unconscious or dissociating affects from their memories and transforming the affects into other useful ideas (Freud, 1915d). In this way, unacceptable impulses escape or avoid the retaliation of the superego and the experience of other anxieties, the intensity of unpleasant drives decreases, and the energy investment for repression reduces. Further, Freud maintained that repressed materials are unconscious, but the process of repression may be unconscious or unconscious.
However, a fundamental question regarding the repression of unwanted affect-laden ideas into the unconscious is: how can the secondary process of psychic function, which is reflective and intentional (Breuer & Freud, 1895d) operate within the region of the unconscious in its function of repression, without the unconscious becoming conscious? In other words, if the unconscious must remain unconscious during the process of repression, how can the ego keep them unconscious while simultaneously remaining conscious of this function? Another fundamental question regarding Freud’s theory of repression and censorship is: how can the unconscious ego make judgments and affirmations of the reality of what is pleasurable or unpleasurable, which is at the level of knowledge and still remains unconscious? On this note, Sartre (1956) critiqued that the very idea of repression is problematic because it requires that the censor knows and does not know at the same time.
A third question is: how can the affect-idea dissociation account of Freudian repression explain the persistent, powerful effect of the unconscious ideas toward the conscious thinking in the symptom-formation (e.g., in hysteria, anxiety, and depression, compulsion), since the affect-idea dissociation means that the repressed unconscious ideas are too weak to act on the conscious awareness? In this paper, therefore, I will look at these epistemological difficulties of Freudian repression and censorship and show possible cognitive compatibilities of unconsciousness and consciousness. Examined in this light, I will show that repression plays an important role in non-conscious cognition.
Repression in Freud’s Psychoanalysis
Repression is a motivated psychological activity toward rejecting unpleasurable and distressing mental contents resulting from the recognition of their incompatibility with the ego. Repression deals with internal stimuli (i.e., undesirable mental contents). Hence, Freud (1915d, p. 146) noted that “if what was in question was the operation of an external stimulus, the appropriate method to adopt would obviously be flight; with an instinct, a flight is of no avail, for the ego cannot escape from itself.” The primary purpose of repression is, therefore, to suppress unpleasurable contents arising from internal stimuli (1915d).
Earlier and Later Accounts of Repression
In his early description of the process of repression in its psychoanalytic sense, as contained in his conflict theory of hysteria, Freud used the terms repression, suppression, inhibition, and dissociation interchangeably (Breuer & Freud, 1895d). In his words, repression involves “a question which the patient wished to forget, and therefore intentionally repressed from his conscious thought and inhibited and suppressed” (Breuer & Freud, 1895d, p. 10). As already mentioned, in his early description of repression, Freud saw repression as an affect-idea dissociation. In other words, he considered the process of repression a robbing off an affect its idea so that the idea becomes consigned to the unconsciousness while the affect becomes associated with other useful ideas or energies. However, this idea of repression was not able to provide a comprehensive account of the basic mechanism of symptom formation and resistance. For him, ideas dissociated from their affects would lack sufficient energy and intensity to come back and disturb the conscious processes. As a rule, an unconscious material enters consciousness only when its intensity increases (Breuer & Freud, 1895d). However, Breuer, a collaborator of Freud, did not believe that ideas separated from affects were intense enough to disturb the conscious. He argued that it would be difficult for an idea to be sufficiently intense to provoke a lively motor act, for instance, without having enough intensity to become conscious (Breuer & Freud, 1895d).
Consequently, in his later works, Freud bought the idea of Breuer’s earlier claims of the intensity of unconscious ideas and gave an upward drive account of repression (Boag, 2012; Freud, 1915d). In this later view of repression, Freud, therefore, argued that the mark of something repressed is the ability to become unconscious while maintaining its intensity, such that it remains causally active, pressing toward conscious thinking and generating symptoms as substitute satisfactions. In other words, repressed materials remain explicitly intense. Thus, Freud (1915d) noted:
We have learnt from psycho-analysis that the essence of the process of repression lies, not in putting an end to, annihilating, the idea which represents an instinct, but in preventing it from becoming conscious. When this happens, we say of the idea that it is in a state of being “unconscious,” and we produce good evidence to show that even when it is unconscious it can produce effects, even including some which finally reach consciousness. (p. 166)
In addition, Freud (1915d) maintained that repression would be made complete by assuming that, before the mental organization reaches this stage, the task of fending off instinctual impulses is dealt with by other vicissitudes (e.g., a reversal into the opposite or turning round upon the subject’s own self) which instincts may undergo. This substitution or distortion of the repressed is necessary to enable it to pass through the censors. Hence, this account of repression explained the idea of repression as resistance, as well as the mechanism of symptom and substitute formations (both of which signify a return of the repressed). This is quite different from the earlier affect-idea dissociation account of repression, by which the dissociated ideas lose their intensity while affects robbed off these ideas are associated with other useful ideas. In any case, Freud generally underscored three possible vicissitudes of repressed drives: the affect may remain wholly or in part as it is; it may transform into a qualitatively different affect, above all into anxiety; or it is completely suppressed and inhibited from being turned into a manifestation of affect (Freud, 1915e).
Censorship and Repression Vis-a-Vis the Unconscious and the Conscious, and the Id, the Ego, and the Superego
The idea of censorship of foreign materials on the frontier between two agencies and that of press censorship informed Freud’s use of the metaphor of censorship in his psychoanalytic illustration of the repressive and filtering work of the mind. For him, the censor has a repressive function of blocking unacceptable, affect-laden memories or images from the unconscious and preventing them from emerging into consciousness. In his views of the human mind, namely, topographical and structural models, the censor plays a vital role in its repressive function. The first view of the human mind is a topographical model in which Freud divided the psyche into systems, namely, the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious. However, he noted that the distinction between preconsciousness and unconsciousness as two kinds of unconsciousness is only in the descriptive sense (Freud, 1915e). So, in the dynamic sense, only conscious and unconscious mind regions exist.
In this model of the psyche, the censor is seen as a “watchman” at the border between the two regions of the mind, performing the crucial role of repressing unacceptable wishes in the unconscious so that they do not have access to the preconscious and eventually to the conscious (Freud, 1915e). The censor, thus, plays a pivotal role in both the interrelation and differentiation of these psychic systems as an agent of repression lying on the border of the preconscious and the unconscious. This role of the censor as a watchman placed at the border between the unconscious and the conscious is also seen in Freud’s analysis of dreams. During dreams, the censor is somewhat relaxed (but not completely removed), such that certain repressed contents in the unconscious are allowed in disguised or distorted form into consciousness in dream representations (Freud,1900a, 1916-1917). However, during the period of wakefulness, the censor regains its strength and represses back any trace of partially revealed mental content. Thus, he argued that our inability to remember certain dream elements is due to censorship manifestation in dreams (Freud, 1916-1917).
Using the analogy of the iceberg, he likened the conscious to the smaller part of an iceberg above the water surface that we are aware of, the preconscious to the part of the iceberg that is sometimes visible and sometimes submerged (i.e., those phenomena which we are not presently aware of but which can be easily brought into consciousness because their resistant is weak), and the unconscious mind, that we are not aware of, to the much larger mass hidden below the water level. The unconscious part of the mind is timeless, and it is the reservoir of instinctual drives, the id, in addition to the mental contents of sexual drives, forbidden desires, painful experiences, selfish needs, irrational wishes, aggressive thoughts, and other unacceptable experiences that have been repressed. For him, the unconscious phenomena exert a great power of control over our conscious thoughts and deeds, and they can be reflected in many ways through slips of the tongue, symptom formation, dreams, works of art, and jokes. In psychotherapies, the unconscious materials creating abnormal behaviors are brought to awareness by lowering or eliminating the resistance of the censor and are integrated into the conscious part of the mind.
The second view of the mind, which came as a later development of Freud’s psychoanalysis, is a structural model in which he developed the tripartite personality structures of the ego, the id, and the superego. This, therefore, focuses on the roles of individuals rather than on systems or regions. In this model, the unconscious system became the id. It contains the drives, governed by the primary process, and is unconscious. The preconscious-conscious system became the ego, and it contains the materials available to awareness. In this personality structure model, Freud perceived an “individual as a psychical id, unknown and unconscious, upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus the pcpt system” (Freud, 1923b, p. 24). He, thus, maintained that the ego is not sharply separated from the id; rather, its lower portion merges into it (Freud, 1923b).
On this note, Freud made a distinction between the unconscious ego and the conscious ego. Whereas the unconscious ego behaves like the repressed, which is part of the id, and is governed by the primary mental process (e.g., spontaneous actions) of the psyche, the conscious ego represents reason and common sense and is governed by the secondary mental process (e.g., thinking, reflection, decision). Defenses of the ego, therefore, possess some characteristics of the primary mental process in that they function in part to reduce tension and, so, follow the pleasure principle. They, however, also exhibit some characteristics of the secondary mental process, for they have a relation in time and reality. Furthermore, the defense mechanisms of the ego that deal with the unconscious impulses are at the border of the id and the ego, much as the censor is at the border of the unconscious and preconscious-conscious systems. Additionally, Freud saw moral thinking as also having a strong unconscious component. Therefore, he termed the moral aspect of the mind, which generates guilt when we act contrary to its roles, the superego (Freud, 1923b).
Epistemological Difficulties of Freudian Theory of Repression and Censorship
As already indicated, Freud’s account of repression appears logically and epistemologically self-contradictory. For instance, how can the secondary mental process of the ego that is thoughtful and reflective extend into the id and the unconscious without the unconscious becoming conscious? In other words, how can a mental activity go into the unconscious-conscious processing such that the unconscious mental act is not affected by consciousness? How can there be unconscious consciousness of what is forbidden and what is disguised, which must be tested before passing through the censor or becoming compatible with the ego? How can the ego know and not know the same thing at the same time? Freud himself described this seeming contradiction in his analogy of repression with being afflicted by the blindness of seeing-eye during his early account of repression (Breuer & Freud, 1895). Hence, he expressed:
I have never managed to give a better description than this of the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at the same time. It is clearly impossible to understand it unless one has been in such a state oneself…I was afflicted by that blindness of the seeing eye which is so astonishing in the attitude of mothers to their daughters, husbands to their wives and rulers to their favourites. (p.117)
According to Boag (2012), this analogy of repression with being afflicted by the blindness of seeing-eye simply indicates that repression entails knowing in order not to know, which is a contradiction in terms. In his work, Being and Nothingness, Sartre (1956) argued that for the censor to effectively do the work of repression and testing, it must know what it is inspecting and what it is repressing. Hence, it is a practical impossibility and theoretical absurdity for the censor to discern the impulses needing to be repressed without being conscious of discerning them. Therefore, Sartre concluded that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which posits a conscious ego and unconscious id, is an exercise in bad faith and a metapsychological self-deception. Similarly, Maze and Henry (1996) observed that a careful examination of Freud’s theory reveals that repression involves knowing in order not to know. In other words, the ego must know what it is not meant to know.
Recognizing this epistemic difficulty, Freud himself came up with the idea of the unconscious ego and the conscious ego in his later work, The Ego and the Id. On the one hand, the unconscious ego behaves exactly like the repressed (i.e., producing powerful effects without itself being conscious) and makes only a predictive judgment of what is pleasurable or unpleasurable, good or bad, harmful or beneficial. On the other hand, the conscious ego makes a judgment of what is real or hallucinatory. Nevertheless, this additional modification could not provide Freud with an escape from the sledgehammer of many critics, as the same problem of self-contradiction lingers. The fundamental question remains: since knowledge resides in judgment, how can the unconscious ego make judgments and affirmations of what is pleasurable or unpleasurable and remain unconscious?
Cognition, Consciousness, and Knowledge
It will be highly important, at this juncture, to shed light on the meaning of cognition, consciousness, and knowledge so that we can clearly understand how they relate to repression and draw insight to unravel this “mystery” of Freudian repression and censorship. According to Lonergan (1957), whose epistemological theories are greatly aligned with those of traditional philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas, cognition is a process that culminates in knowing. It has three levels: the empirical level (e.g., sensing, perceiving, and imagining); the level of intelligence (inquiry, understanding, and formulation); and the level of reflection and judgment, where knowledge is gained. In their acts, the senses can only experience data but cannot describe, formulate, distinguish, compare, relate, or define, for such activities are the work of intelligence or understanding. However, descriptions, definitions, formulations, comparisons, objects of thought, suppositions, considerations, etc., are still hypotheses, so they may be accurate or inaccurate, correct or mistaken. Pronouncing their correctness, truthfulness, and accuracy is the work of reflection and judgment, where knowledge is had (Lonergan, 1957). Therefore, like Aristotle and Aquinas, Lonergan affirmed that, although every element in the cognitional process is at least a partial increment, making some contribution to knowing, judgment is the total increment in the process.
Therefore, in line with the traditional philosophy, knowledge is found in the act of judgment because it is the realm of truth and falsity, existence and non-existence, assenting and dissenting, affirmation and denial, agreeing or disagreeing, certitude and probability (Lonergan, 1957). Hence, cognition is a process that culminates in knowledge through acts of reflection and judgment. In other words, cognitive acts, such as mere perception, attention, cogitative/estimative sense (the primitive sense of the harmful and the beneficial), memory, understanding, and thought, are not knowledge until they involve the reflective judgment of the truthfulness of the existence of what is cognized. Consequently, knowing necessarily involves consciousness (an awareness immanent in our cognitional act, either awareness of some content/object or awareness of the acts), but consciousness is not necessarily knowing because experiences and understanding, while being acts of consciousness, are not yet judgment where knowledge essentially resides (Lonergan, 1957).
However, at the empirical level of human cognition, there is a special type of non-conscious estimation of what is harmful or beneficial, a kind of “judgment” that occurs in an internal sense that is known as the cogitative sense (vis cogitativa). I will discuss this cogitative sense in detail later. Moreover, recent findings have shown that cognition, especially sense perception, can either occur consciously or unconsciously. This differentiation of knowledge from cognition and consciousness is very important in solving the puzzle of repression, which involves “being afflicted by the blindness of seeing-eye,” or knowing not to know (Breuer & Freud, 1895).
Resolving the Epistemic Paradox of Freudian Repression and Censorship
To explain this seeming self-contradiction of Freud’s theory of censorship and repression, the epistemological insight of Aquinas and Lonergan on vis cogitativa and evidence from neuropsychological studies will be of great importance.
Censorship/Repression and the Vis Cogitativa
According to Avicenna, influenced by Aristotle’s notion of accidental sensible, lower animals have an estimative sense or intention (vis aestimativa), a receptive faculty of intention (i.e., per accident sensible) by which they instinctually react to harmful objects around them (Tellkamp, 2012). Building on this idea, Aquinas held that the vis cogitativa incorporates the animal vis aestimativa, and, at the same time, plays the peculiar role of grasping intentions as standing under a common form. So, the vis cogitativa, for Aquinas, is a special and primitive sense of the harmful and the beneficial, as well as a sense that grasps particular forms of objects in preparation for their intellectual abstractions. Thus, he wrote:
the power which is called “cogitativa” by the philosopher, is on the boundary of sensitive and intellective parts, whereby the sensitive part touches the intellective for it has something from the sensitive part, namely, that it considers particular forms; and it has something from the intellective, namely that it compares; and so it is men alone. (Sent. III, d, 23, q. 2, a. 2)
Therefore, for Aquinas, the vis cogitativa also does the work of passive intellect, by which, in Aristotle’s epistemology, phantasms (sensible images or representations of material contents, including particularity, size, and shape) are received before becoming dematerialized through the process of abstraction by the agency of active intellect to become universals. He thus called this faculty ratio particularis (particular reasoning), for it recognizes the same in many instances without requiring any intelligence (Aquinas, Sent. III, d, 23, q. 2, a. 2; Tellkamp, 2012). Without the vis cogitativa, Aquinas argued, the soul cannot understand this life. Thus, no understanding or judgment can occur without this faculty, which must provide the phantasm needed for abstraction and universalization in the acts of conceptualization and judgment.
Now, Aquinas’s treatment of the vis cogitativa shows that it is both an estimative intention of instinctual and emotional reactions and an intentional cognitive grasping of material forms in preparation for intellectual acts, such as understanding and judgment. This is very insightful regarding the intentionality of the act of repression, as Freud indicated in his early account of repression, as well as his claim of unconscious-conscious interaction of the ego with the id via repression. Suffice it to mention that in the traditional philosophy, there are four distinct internal senses: the common sense, which unifies the perception of the various external senses and perceives the operation of each sensation; imagination or phantasm, which retains the material form perceived by external senses; the cogitative sense (vis cogitativa), which apprehends the particular forms, as well as makes an estimation of particular objects; and memory, which retains the intentions perceived by the vis cogitativa and the intellectual acts of understanding and judgment (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q.78, a. 4). Hence, no confusion should exist between the act of judgment (which is based on reflective insight and knowing) and the vis cogitativa (which is a special type of spontaneous non-conscious or deliberate conscious evaluation at the level of sense perception).
Furthermore, Lonergan (1957), influenced by Aquinas’s epistemological insight, compared the Freudian censor with the vis cogitativa and showed how the repression is both conscious and unconscious, intentional and spontaneous. This similarity contributes immensely to resolving the difficulty of how the same ego both knows and does not know. For Lonergan (1957), the vis cogitativa, in its role of estimation of what is harmful or beneficial and in preparation of particular forms of objects for their abstractions and insights, provides the connection between the unconscious and the conscious. Although Lonergan’s understanding of the unconscious is that it is an underlying neural system rather than a region of the human mind, he maintained that repressed materials that have passed the inspection of the censor (i.e., the vis cogitativa in this case) and so are compatible with the self (the ego) are presented by the vis cogitativa to judgment for insight. Thus, following Aquinas, he asserts that without the vis cogitativa there is no insight (understanding and judgment). For Lonergan, the censor primarily has a constructive role in selecting and arranging materials that emerge in consciousness in such a way that insight could occur. Also, it aberrantly has a repressive function to block or thwart the emergence of unwanted images that could give rise to insight (Lonergan, 1957). The avoidance of unwanted insight can be unconscious or conscious, spontaneous or deliberate.
Censorship/Repression and Neurological Structures
Empirical evidence has shown that, in addition to conscious cognitive processing, certain cognitions occur non-consciously, nondeclaratively, or implicitly. They include priming, procedural learning, classical conditioning, spatial memory, habituation, and sensitization (Breedlove & Watson, 2018). For instance, Weiskrantz and Warrington (1970) conducted a neuropsychological dissociation of nondeclarative memory from explicit memory and found that amnesics, after reading a list of words, could not recall the list when tested explicitly but performed very well when presented with the starting alphabet of each word and asked to complete the words. Similarly, Butcher, Mineka, and Hooley (2014) also noted that an amnesic patient, when asked to dial numbers on the phone, randomly dialed his mother’s number without realizing what he was doing.
In his explanation of brain mechanisms that contribute to unconscious repressions, Kissi (1986 ) underscored that mental processing in subcortical structures, which are located in the Thalamic-basal ganglia complex, prevents information about the repression of negative stimuli from reaching higher cortical structures for conscious processing. In other words, whenever negative stimuli are perceived at the subcortical level, the emotional component of the stimuli is recognized before the conscious component (Kissi, 1986). On this note, recent findings have shown that the thalamus relays information from fear-inducing stimuli to the amygdala either indirectly via the cortex and hippocampus, allowing for the conscious processing of threats, or directly, which bypasses the conscious processing, allowing for an unconscious fear appraisal and conditioning (Breedlove & Watson, 2018). In addition to the unconscious process of the amygdala in making a simple appraisal of a stimulus regarding its safety or dangerousness, Pally (1998) remarked that the orbitofrontal cortex’s reaction to complex information about a stimulus involves unconscious processing.
Conclusion
From both neurological and epistemological accounts of unconscious dynamic processes, it is clear that the human mind is capable of processing information unconsciously and consciously and that both unconscious and conscious repressions do occur. Using Thomistic-Lonerganian terminology, one can thus say that the censor and its repressive function are neither self-contradictory nor self-deceptive, but a cogitative primitive sense of processing threats and unpleasurable internal stimuli, which can occur both unconsciously or consciously, spontaneously or deliberately. When repression is unconscious, then there is a non-conscious (unconscious or preconscious) cognition of the spontaneous processing of the vis cogitativa toward the repressed unpleasure material. Similarly, when repression is conscious, then there is a conscious cognition of the spontaneous or deliberate reaction of the vis cogitativa toward the repressed harmful materials, which may involve the role of thought, understanding, and even knowledge. Therefore, Freud’s psychoanalysis, which proposes a communication of the id with the ego, is supported and justified.
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