ABSTRACT
While, for Freud, drives and aects provide the foundations of personality, it is conict, repression, and defence that provide the foundations for psychoanalytic theory generally and his metapsychology specically. Freud declared that the “ theory of repression is the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests” (Freud, 1914d, p. 16; cf. Freud, 1925d, p. 30) and a simple reason for this concerns the eects of repression. Freud (1915d) writes that “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” (p. 147, his italics), and the targets of repression are typically desires and wishes (‘instinctual representatives’—Freud, 1915d) that invoke anxiety and are blocked from both awareness and being acted upon. These targets, however, fuelled by their endogenous sources, are not thereafter destroyed but instead persist and remain causally active (Freud, 1900a, p. 577; 1915e, p. 166; 1919g, p. 260; 1933a, p. 68; 1939a, p. 95), which then allows Freud to explain the symptoms of the psychoneuroses and other phenomena, such as dreams and slips, in terms of repressed wishes, blocked from primary sources of gratication, acquiring substitutive ones (e.g. Freud, 1926f, p. 267; 1939a, p. 127). Conict and repression thus provide Freud with a dynamic explanation of psychoneurotic symptoms, and indeed the mind generally:
We seek not merely to describe and to classify phenomena, but to understand them as signs of an interplay of forces in the mind, as a manifestation of purposeful intentions working concurrently or in mutual opposition. We are concerned with a dynamic view of mental phenomena.
