The unconscious as a product of repression is the content of the field of consciousness, by some forces (power centers) for one reason or another, hard or softly repressed from the realm of awareness. Who displaces whom, how much it displaces, how it displaces and what are the consequences of repression — here the views of different researchers diverge.
As for the ideas of Sigmund Freud, he believed that repression can only occur in one direction, namely, the Super-I, the representative of society in consciousness, as a stronger instance, displaces a weaker content: the primary children’s desires, undesirable for the Super-I. As a result, the content of the unconscious, according to Freud, is the primary children’s drives that live in us, but are not recognized because of their social unacceptability or mismatch with other needs, motives and attitudes of the individual.
Freud did not know other types of the unconscious, did not assume and simply denied.
Moreover, according to Freud, this repression is hard, that is, it is impossible to get the unconscious, return it to the consciousness of a person by ordinary means. This is an area of the psychic, where things that are fundamentally inaccessible to me happen, but not meaningless, but having meaning and logic. They can only be deciphered by a specialist using special methods, such as hypnosis or the interpretation of free associations. Attention is fundamentally lacking.
According to Freud, the volume of such an unconscious exceeds the volume of consciousness (a metaphor for an iceberg, where consciousness is a tiny peak, and the main block under water is the unconscious), and it is this that is responsible for most neurotic manifestations. It is the unconscious, according to Freud, that is to blame for all our personal troubles. This is the unconscious in the original and narrow sense, the unconscious in the understanding of Z. Freud.
Today it is already clear that the unconscious is not one, there are many types of the unconscious; it is quite clear that repression is only one of the causes of neurotic reactions, and not the most serious one, and at the same time the direction and content of repression can be very diverse: as a result of a collision, not only children’s drives, but also adult attitudes coming from society.
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We doubt that this kind of unconscious is present in the soul of everyone — it seems that such an unconscious does not yet exist in the psyche of a small child, just as it does not exist in the mind of an adult person, if this consciousness is friendly, positive and accepting. See →
Repression is not according to Freud
As a product of repression, the unconscious may also have a different nature than Freud’s description of it.
Yes, unwanted content can be erased from consciousness or pushed into the unconscious. But who displaces whom is a separate question, because there are two players in the mind: “It” and “Super-I”. Freud was convinced that it was the society that, through the Superego, ousted antisocial drives from consciousness. Can displacement occur in the other direction? Namely, can “It” displace the social that one does not want to remember and is unpleasant?
OI Motkov: “I also feel that there are many types of the unconscious. For example, I had a displacement of relearning at school from the left to the right hand. I’m left-handed, and I don’t remember at all how I learned to write. But it was rather unpleasant. These unpleasant emotions were forced out so as not to overstrain the psyche. Automatic protective mechanism. Apparently, after that, I was wary of any pressure in the learning process and internally resisted it. see →
Think about it: who is displacing whom here? Indeed, for many (for everyone? — check. Have there been studies?), unpleasant events are forgotten faster than pleasant ones, and it can be assumed that this is the action of the same process of ousting from the consciousness of what one does not want to see there. I don’t want to see it — and I drive it out of my mind. «It» hosts…