ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud's discovery that forgetting ideas is invariably motivated by some painful affect accompanying them suggests the correlated problem: how is it that repressed ideas re-enter consciousness at the end of a series of free associations? Is it possible that during the process of association a repressed idea loses its painful tone, or is it that the painful affect loses its quality as a motive for repression? The subject compensates himself, so to speak, before he reveals the fact which lowers his self-esteem. In some analyses the compensating thought does not form part of the chain of associations. In certain of these cases one can discover that it did come into consciousness, nevertheless, but was suppressed. In the author's opinion it is possible from a certain point of view to discriminate two different kinds of discounting process in the specific mechanism of the symptoms in schizophrenic diseases and paranoiac diseases.
