Repression is a key concept of psychoanalysis, where it is understood as a defense mechanism that "ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it.
When it is internalized, the threat of punishment related to this form of anxiety becomes the superego, which intercedes against the desires of the id (which works on the basis of the pleasure principle).
[9] Neurosis may occur when the personality develops under the influence of the superego and the pressure of the repressed impulses, leading to behavior that is irrational, self-destructive, or antisocial.
These psychologists were influenced by an exposition of the concept of repression published by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones in the American Journal of Psychology in 1911.
"[17] In 1934, the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig and his co-author G. Mason criticized Meltzer, concluding that the studies he reviewed suffered from two basic problems: that the studies "worked with hedonic tone associated with sensory stimuli unrelated to the theory of repression rather than with conative hedonic tone associated with frustrated striving, which is the only kind of 'unpleasantnesss' which, according to the Freudian theory, leads to repression" and that they "failed to develop under laboratory control the experiences which are subsequently to be tested for recall".
In MacKinnon and Dukes's view, psychologists who wanted to study repression in the laboratory "faced the necessity of becoming clear about the details of the psychoanalytic formulation of repression if their researches were to be adequate tests of the theory" but soon discovered that "to grasp clearly even a single psychoanalytic concept was an almost insurmountable task."
"[18] MacKinnon and Dukes write that, while psychoanalysts were at first only disinterested in attempts to study repression in laboratory settings, they later came to reject them.
They relate that in 1934, when Freud was sent reprints of Rosenzweig's attempts to study repression, he responded with a dismissive letter stating that "the wealth of reliable observations" on which psychoanalytic assertions were based made them "independent of experimental verification."
"[19] Writing in 1962, MacKinnon and Dukes state that experimental studies "conducted during the last decade" have largely abandoned the term "repression", choosing instead to refer to the phenomenon as "perceptual defense".
They concluded by noting that psychologists remained divided in their view of repression, some regarding it as well-established, others as needing further evidence to support it, and still others finding it indefensible.
[27] (However these sensations may also cause distortions, as human memory in general is filtered both by layers of perception, and by "appropriate mental schema ... spatio-temporal schemata").