There are several defensive mechanisms proposed by psychoanalysis, highlighting, above all, projection, repression and denial.
These three mechanisms are considered psychological processes that, far from being beneficial for our mental health, can lead to emotional discomfort and psychopathology, which emerges in the form of dysfunctional behaviors and thoughts.
However, there is a mechanism that is not considered so harmful to our mental health and that, in fact, brings us a certain well-being: suppression. Let’s see what suppression is in psychoanalysis and what benefits it entails.
Within psychoanalysis, suppression is understood defense mechanism that the individual uses when trying to keep a memory, emotion or thought away from consciousness that causes anxiety. The person, 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 mundane act of forgetting. In fact, When Sigmund Freud proposed this concept of suppression in 1892, he did so looking towards his idea of repression, only it is done consciously. We try to distance ourselves from things that may involve some conflict in our psyche if we constantly remember them.
An example of suppression in daily life would be when we have broken up with our partner. The event is not pleasant and remembering what feelings were had at the time of the breakup, what was said, how each person took the act of breaking up among other related aspects, is something that can burn us if we are over and over again. Thinking about it. We try to put it aside, while we do other things that give us well-being.
Another case would be with the death of a loved one. It is obvious that you will go through a period of mourning, something totally normal after the loss of a loved one, whether due to death or a simple breakup of the relationship. However, remembering how the person died, especially if it was due to illness, is something that is not good for our mind. That’s why we try to keep our minds busy doing other things, or think about the good things we still have, like 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 express a lower degree of anxiety or even stop having this emotion. In fact, and briefly leaving aside the psychoanalytic approach to the cognitive-behavioral approach, in this therapy, to combat dysfunctional thought patterns, which lead to negative emotions, one of the strategies used is suppression: making the person think about something pleasant and avoid thinking about a past event that causes you discomfort.
However, and returning to psychoanalysis, it is worth saying that This process is not always beneficial for mental health. This is true if you are trying to push something you should be dealing with out of your consciousness.
For example, let’s imagine that we have a tyrannical boss who treats us quite badly. We know that he shouldn’t treat us like this, but we also know that we can’t confront him because if we do, we might lose our job. That is why we try to forget the feelings and thoughts about him, and be at peace for a while. The problem comes that, when we are close to him, these strong thoughts try to surface, they change our behavior, we get nervous and we do our job poorly.
Be that as it may, psychoanalysis, with the exception of this last example presented here, considers that the mechanism of suppression, along with others such as sublimation, are among the most mature that we have. We have more or less conscious control over what causes us discomfort and we try to remove it from our consciousness, in order to improve our well-being without completely forgetting the unpleasant event.
Differences between suppression, denial and repression
Suppression is closely related to two other defense mechanisms proposed by psychoanalysis: repression and denial. These three mechanisms share their 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 he does so completely voluntarily. It is not a dark mental process that makes us forget something because its emotional burden is so serious that our conscious would not be able to bear it. It’s about avoiding thinking about it it’s that simple.
This mechanism differs from repression and denial in the fact that unwanted thoughts, even though you do not want to think about them, can be recovered voluntarily. The person, without cognitive difficulty but with emotional difficulty, is capable of remembering what he has tried to forget.
In repression and denial, the person is not aware of their feelings is not capable of having in consciousness what he is repressing or what is refusing to see reality as it is.
Repression implies that unwanted thoughts are repressed, that is, hidden, but completely unconscious. They are removed from the world of consciousness without us realizing it, but they are not eliminated. Memories remain in our unconscious.
This mechanism is understandable with cases of sexual abuse in childhood, where the person, to protect themselves without knowing it, has hidden the unpleasant memory deep in the mind. Although this will affect her behavior, for example, making her have a bad predisposition to have relationships with other people.
How do these mechanisms differ from forgetting?
After talking about the main differences between suppression, repression and denial, it is worth relating these concepts and, in particular, that of suppression, with the act of forgetting. It may seem that repressing and suppressing are simple modalities of forgetting, but the truth is that there are certain nuances that must be taken into account.
Forgetting something is, in essence, causing any information to be removed, unconsciously and unwantedly, 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 unconsciousness, without us having desired it that way.
Forgetting is something that is part of our daily lives, basically because we are not supercomputers. We cannot be conscious and remember at every moment all the data that we have stored in our brain. We need to free our consciousness and reserve it for those data that provide us with some type of benefit or adaptability in the short term.
Since it is something everyday, it is normal to forget mundane things, such as an ingredient when going to the market, not remembering that you had an appointment with the doctor, having a word on the tip of your tongue… But also these mundane things They can 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 we had a hard time remembering.
The main difference with suppression is that this defense mechanism is conscious, while forgetting is not. Furthermore, 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 respect to repression, it is true that both processes share the fact that they occur unconsciously. Both in everyday forgetting and in repression, a memory or data is hidden, in an unpremeditated way. However, in repression one stops being aware of a terribly unpleasant event, a traumatic and harmful memory. On the other hand, in mundane forgetting, although the nature of the forgotten data may imply different emotionality, it is normal for it to be something that is not serious.
