Repression

Definition

Repression, in Freud's psychoanalysis, is the psychic mechanism by which unacceptable wishes, memories, and impulses are pushed out of conscious awareness and into the unconscious — where they continue to exert pressure and return in disguised forms (symptoms, slips, dreams). For architecture, repression illuminates the non-rational dimension of spatial experience: buildings and spaces can be experienced as "unwelcome reminder[s] of unconscious wishes" (Abell), and architectural preferences may be shaped by what is repressed rather than what is consciously chosen. Freud's claim that "an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and normality" — that the perverse "must form a part of what passes as the normal constitution" — suggests that the repressed is not pathological exception but constitutive of ordinary experience, including ordinary architectural experience.

Key Thinkers

• Sigmund Freud — repression as the cornerstone of the unconscious.
• John Abell — repression and the "ugly reminder" of unconscious wishes in architectural experience.

Related Concepts

• Unconscious — the region repression creates and populates.
• Psychoanalysis — the discipline organized around the theory of repression.
• Trauma — the experience whose repression produces the symptom.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Freud for Architects — repression, the normal/pathological continuum, and architectural experience.
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — repression as an operator on architectural categories: "Disturbing dreams and repressed fears transform surface into cavity, large into minute, the miniature into the overwhelming. These curious places become the refuge of the half-realized" (p. 357) — the repressed content re-making the rooms that hold it (surfaces opening into cavities, scales inverting); and the house as the repressed's metabolist — "an 'illusory,' malleable, adaptive character that assimilates unexpressed and unacknowledged anxieties and feelings of loss" (p. 358) — the dwelling absorbing what its inhabitant cannot express, with the "unconscious ones lurking in smaller, peripheral spaces" (p. 356) as where the repressed is stored. See unconscious, hidden-spaces, fear.