ABSTRACT
Initially repression and defense were synonymous for Sigmund Freud but the need for conceptual specificity would gradually modify his concept of defense. C. Brenner described the evolution of Freud’s ideas on repression, four fertile periods of Freud’s creativity needing to be differentiated to do anything close to justice to the elegance, depth and originality of Feud’s ideas. The classical depiction of repression seems to need the concept of a “failure of repression” to account for the psychic manifestations of the reappearance of what was expelled, what Freud called the “impulsion to break through into consciousness.” Freud, less fatalistic than M. Proust perhaps, argues that the repressed past is accompanied nonetheless by “a strong upward drive, an impulsion to break through into consciousness.” The idea of a failure of repression, which is the traditional way of describing these dynamic events, seems too passive a depiction of this opportunity for redress of the neurotic or the habitual.
