ABSTRACT
All psychoanalytic approaches to the study of personality are derived from the work of Sigmund Freud. The unconscious is believed to take up a huge part of our psyche, and contains all the things that are not easily available to awareness. Labelled ‘motivated forgetting’ by Anna Freud, repression means that the ego forces the impulse or memory out of conscious awareness and into the unconscious so the individual is unable to recall the threatening situation, person or event. Anna Freud called this ‘believing the opposite’, and it occurs when the ego changes an unacceptable impulse into its opposite. One of the most controversial aspects of Freud’s theories is the idea that infants and young children have sexual experiences and feel sexual pleasure. There has been lots of research into defence mechanisms as they are seen as a part of Freud’s theory for which it may be possible to find evidence.
