ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic concept of repression is frequently invoked in discussions of the validity of recovered memories of abuse, and "forgotten" memories are nearly always thought of as having been relegated by repression to "the unconscious". The Unconscious was seen as the reservoir of primitive sexual wishes, to which had been added derivatives of these primitive wishes, derivatives that had been created during the course of development and repressed because they conflicted with the individual's moral standards and sense of security. Freud's theory of repression, as it applied to his topographical model of the mind, functioned in the service of the censorship between the Preconscious and the Unconscious systems. Freud's system Unconscious was regarded as being clearly differentiated from the Preconscious, as a consequence of a massive amount of repression of childhood memories, resulting in the infantile amnesia. Repression occurs in the present unconscious as a mechanism of defence.
