Scotomization is a psychological term for the mental blocking of unwanted perceptions, analogous to the visual blindness of an actual scotoma.
[1] Reviving in the 1920s this term, Rene Laforgue and Edouard Pichon introduced the idea of scotomization into psychoanalysis – a move initially welcomed by Freud in 1926 as a useful description of the hysterical avoidance of distressing perceptions.
[2] The following year, however, he attacked the term for suggesting that the perception was wholly blotted out (as with a retina's blind spot), whereas his clinical experience showed that on the contrary intense psychic measures had to be taken to keep the unwanted perception out of consciousness.
"[4] Decades later in the 1950s, the question of scotomization re-emerged in a phenomological context under the influence of Jacques Lacan.
[7] Most significantly of all, however, he developed it into his influential update of Pichon's concept of foreclosure, thus endowing that idea with a conflation of visual and verbal elements.