ABSTRACT
In view of Sigmund Freud’s break with Jung over the importance accorded sex in psychoanalysis, it is perhaps no surprise that, soon after this break, Freud began consolidating psychoanalysis with an essay about sex. In this chapter, the author distinguishes two types of repression: ‘primal’ repression preventing instinctual material ever becoming conscious; and repression ‘proper’, which stops once conscious ‘derivatives’ of this instinctual material remaining conscious. In the early years of psychoanalysis Freud had explored manifestations of what is repressed and unconscious in the form of dreams, slips, jokes, neurotic symptoms, free associations, and in the form of the patient’s transference experience of the psychoanalyst. Freud included ‘anxiety hysteria’ a term he used to describe the experience of being anxious without knowing what one is anxious about. He also pointed out that anxiety can be attached to a substitute for a repressed and unconscious idea.
