There are several defensive mechanisms proposed by psychoanalysis, highlighting, above all, projection, repression and denial.

These three mechanisms are considered to be psychological processes that, far from being beneficial to our mental health, can lead to emotional distress and psychopathology, which emerge in the form of dysfunctional thoughts and behaviors.

However, there is a mechanism that is not considered so harmful to our mental health and that, in fact, brings us some well-being: suppression. Let’s see what suppression is in psychoanalysis , and what benefits it implies.

What is suppression in psychoanalysis?

Within psychoanalysis, suppression is understood as the defence mechanism that the individual uses when he tries to keep a memory, emotion or thought that causes him anxiety away from consciousness. The person, upon seeing that he is not capable of passively forgetting the information that is causing him discomfort, consciously and voluntarily tries to keep that memory hidden in the depths of his mind.

The act of suppression involves keeping unwanted thoughts out of our field of consciousness, and is a process closely related to repression, dissociation and denial, as well as the worldly act of forgetting. In fact, when Sigmund Freud proposed this concept of suppression in 1892, he did so by looking at his idea of repression, only that it is done in a conscious way . We try to move away from that which can imply some conflict in our psyche if we constantly remember it.

An example of suppression in everyday life would be when we have broken up with our partner. The event is not pleasant and remembering what feelings you had at the time of the breakup, what was said, how each of you took the act of breaking up among other related aspects, is something that can burn us out if we are thinking about it over and over again. We try to put it aside, while doing other things that give us well-being .

Another case would be the death of a loved one. It is obvious that one will go through a period of mourning, something totally normal after the loss of a loved one, whether by death or by simple break-up of the relationship. However, remembering how the person died, especially if it was due to illness, is not good for our minds. That’s why we try to keep our minds busy doing other things, or thinking about the good things we still have, such as great friends and family.

These two examples above are cases where suppression has clear adaptive functionality. It is a healthy process and allows the person to manifest a lower degree of anxiety or even to stop having this emotion. In fact, and leaving aside briefly the psychoanalytic approach, passing to the cognitive-behavioral one, in this therapy, to fight the dysfunctional thought patterns, which bring about negative emotions, one of the strategies used is the suppression: to make the person think of something pleasant and avoid thinking about a past event that causes him/her discomfort.

However, returning to psychoanalysis, it can be said that this process is not always beneficial for mental health . This is so if you are trying to push something away from your consciousness that you should be facing.

For example, let’s imagine we have a tyrannical boss who treats us pretty badly. We know that this is not the way he should treat us, but we also know that we cannot deal with him because, if we do, we may lose our jobs. That’s why we try to forget our feelings and thoughts about him, and get some peace for a while. The problem is that, when we are near him, these strong thoughts try to come out, change our behavior, make us nervous and do our job badly.

Be that as it may, psychoanalysis, with the exception of this last example here, considers that the mechanism of suppression, along with others such as that of sublimation, are among the most mature mechanisms that we possess. We have more or less conscious control over that which generates discomfort in us and we try to remove it from our consciousness, in order to improve our well-being without this implying that we completely forget the unpleasant event.

Differences between suppression, denial and repression

Suppression is closely related to two other defence mechanisms proposed by psychoanalysis : repression and denial. These three mechanisms share the main function of protecting the person’s psyche although they have significant differences in the way they relate to the person’s health, in addition to the degree of control that is exercised over the three mechanisms.

As we have already mentioned, suppression is a mechanism that implies that an unwanted thought, emotion or memory is consciously suppressed. That is, the subject tries not to think about them, but does so totally voluntarily. It is not an obscure mental process that makes us forget something because its emotional charge is so serious that our conscious would not be able to bear it. It’s about avoiding thinking about it , just like that.

This mechanism differs from repression and denial in the fact that unwanted thoughts, even if one does not want to think about them, can be recovered voluntarily. The person, without cognitive difficulty but emotional, is able to remember what he has tried to forget.

In repression and denial, the person is not aware of his feelings , is not able to have in his consciousness what he is repressing or what he is refusing to see reality as it is.

Repression implies that unwanted thoughts are repressed, that is, hidden, but in a totally unconscious way. They are removed from the world of consciousness without us being aware of it, but they are not eliminated. The memories remain in our unconscious.

This mechanism is understandable with cases of sexual abuse in childhood, where the person, in order to protect himself without knowing it, has hidden the unpleasant memory in the depths of his mind. Although this will affect his behaviour, for example, making him unwilling to have relationships with other people.

How do these mechanisms differ from oblivion?

After talking about the main differences between suppression, repression and denial, we can relate these concepts, and in particular that of suppression, to the act of forgetting. It may seem that repression and suppression are simple modalities of forgetting, but the truth is that there are certain nuances that must be taken into account.

To forget something is, in essence, to make any information be removed, unconsciously and unwanted, although not always, from the field of consciousness. Basically, it consists of us ceasing to be aware of a memory. It remains stored in the world of the unconscious, without our having wished it so .

He forgot about something that is part of our daily lives, basically because we are not supercomputers. We can’t be conscious and remember all the data we’ve stored in our brains at all times. We need to release our consciousness and reserve it for those data that will bring us some kind of benefit or short-term adaptability.

Since it is an everyday thing, it is normal to forget mundane things, such as an ingredient when going to the market, not remembering that you had a doctor’s appointment, having a word on the tip of your tongue… But these mundane things can also be remembered when, suddenly, something related to them appears, such as the shopping list, the doctor’s phone number card or someone saying that word that was so hard for us to remember.

The main difference with suppression is that this defense mechanism is conscious, while oblivion is not . In addition, the event or feeling that we try to hide in the depths of our mind is something with a great emotional charge, while everyday forgetfulness is usually about banal things.

With regard to repression, it is true that both processes share the fact that they occur unconsciously. Both in daily forgetfulness and in repression, a memory or data is hidden, in an unpremeditated way. However, in repression one ceases to be aware of a terribly unpleasant event, a traumatic and harmful memory. In contrast, in worldly oblivion, although the nature of the forgotten data may imply different emotionality, it is usually something that is not serious.

Bibliographic references:

  • Freud, Sigmund. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66.
  • Werman, D.S. (1983). Suppression as a defense. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 31(S), 405-415.