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Example research essay topic: Alexithymia And The Defense Of Primal Repression - 1,197 words

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Primal Repression may well account for the psychic structural defect and many of the clinical features associated with the alexithymia construct. [James D. A. Parker and Graeme J. Taylor in Disorders of Affect Regulation p. 89 ] Repression proper is a defensive process that evolves out of primal repression, and involves a rejection from the conscious mind of already formed instinctual wishes and other representations. Primal repression, on the other hand, is akin to [an] idea of Freud's viz. , his concept of foreclosure in which aspects of experience have been repudiated and never represented psychically.

Cohen and Kinston (1984) relate primal repression to the experience of traumatic events, especially parental failure to meet the infants emotional needs during the preverbal period of development, that were never comprehended cognitively, but encoded as pre-representational experiential elements including sensory impressions, stereotyped actions, physiological reactions, and isolated images and affects. Even in adult life severe trauma can overwhelm the ego and evoke primal repression and an associated regression in affective functioning. Dorpat (1985) considers primal repression a form of primitive denial and believes it involves an arrest in cognitive functions that ordinarily serve to represent, integrate, and regulate experience. [P. 43 - 44 ] More recently, Kuchenhoff (1993) has linked alexithymia with the defense of primitive denial and is identified by Kuchenhoff as a radical exclusion of unbearable thoughts and affects from the intra psychic experience. As Kuchenhoff explains, Such an exclusion of psychic representation brings about psychic stress that cannot be symbolized. According to Dorpat (1985), primitive denial also corresponds to the defense of primal repression which, as outlined in chapter 2, was conceptualized initially by Freud (1915 a) as a stage in the development of ordinary repression, or repression proper. While primal repression may function together with repression proper, This primitive defense prevents the formation of verbal representations of experiences (Dorpat, 1985) and may well account for the psychic structural defect and many of the clinical features associated with the alexithymia construct. [p. 89 ] [The] concept of primal repression can also account for an arrest in the formation of verbal representations of traumatic experiences and associated affects, which then exist as pathological memory forms, proto symbolically organized (Dorpat, 1985), and compulsively enacted through abnormal illness behaviour and the experiencing of somatic symptoms and hypochondriacal worries.

This latter conceptualization leads us to a further elaboration of Taylors (1973) proposal that people who sometime deny aspects of [their] condition. The denial employed is primitive in nature and corresponds to primal repression, which involves a constriction and arrest in cognitive functioning and does not respond in the usual way to interpretation of defenses (Dorpat, 1985; Krystal, 1988). Though traditionally referred to as defenses, dissociation, primal repression, and primitive denial also signify deficits in the cognitive processing of distressing affects and a failure to assimilate the totality of traumatic events. [p. 137 ] In the terminology of classical psychoanalysis, therapeutic interventions are directed at restructuring and transforming traumatic experiences that have been managed psychically through the mechanism of primal repression (as opposed to repression proper) or primitive denial into mental representations (word presentations) that can give them logical meaning and modulate associated affective distress by standing for the experiences. Though access to unmentalized experience may be gained often through analysis of countertransferrence responses to the projective identifications of alexi thymic patients (Taylor 1977), severely alexi thymic patients use [a predominately] communicative mode described by Langs (1978) in which language is used to construct impenetrable barriers by destroying meaning and links between the patients internal world and the external real world. [This type of] alexi thymic patient, as Brown (1985) explains, must rupture any affective links to the analyst (or psychotherapist) in order to avert the emergence of intensely painful material by remaining interaction ally concrete. It is this type of patient who can paralyze the therapists analytic function and produce the prolonged periods of stagnation described by McDougall (1972). Though the alexithymia and symptomatology of these patients is often unresponsive to treatment, attempts to reconstruct early trauma can sometimes lead to a breakthrough in psychoanalytic therapy.

The process of reconstruction, as outlined by Cohen (1993) and Kinston and Cohen (1986, 1988), is not the same as genetic interpretations, which explain the present in terms of the past as remembered by the patient, but addresses defects of memory resulting from traumatic experiences that may not have been represented mentally but were managed by primal repression. The reconstruction is based on inferences from the patients reports of past events or screen memories, enactments, bodily postures, and somatic symptoms, as well as from observations of the transference and countertranference and information from other important people in the patients life. There is usually a paradoxical worsening in the patients condition as the trauma is relived, and this can occur only after the patient has developed a sense of safety and primary relatedness with the therapist which permits the emergence of primal repression. [p. 261 ] [Quotes taken from Disorders of Affect Regulation Primal repression is one of several 'types' of repression. Standard word usage in psychology defines type as of "a class or group distinguished by one or more characteristics in common." What repression proper and primal repression have in common is to exclude, control, or block defensively, or if we like: to 'press back' if we use its etymological meaning. There are of course significant variations between types, as outlined above. Kinston and Cohen in thier main essay 'Repression; a new look at the cornerstone' (1983) qualify repression-proper as "after-repression" or "after pressure", as differentiated from primal-repression which qualifies as 'before-repression' or 'repression-prior' the latter blocking formation of specific psychic representations.

Primal repression may well be a factor common to a large proportion of high-scoring alexithymic's, and in the words of Parker and Taylor: primal repression: "may well account for the psychic structural defect and many of the clinical features associated with the alexithymia construct." ALEXITHYMIA AND TYPE C COMMUNICATION Apparently the primal repression defence is associated with, and also facilitated by the Type-C communication style described by Lang: Bagby and Taylor: The type C mode seems to be associated with greater use of primal repression, suggesting a history of very early infantile trauma and reflects functioning in the sensory-dominated autistic-contiguous position. [Disorders of Affect Regulation p. 45 ] The type C field and mode of communication employed by the more severely alexi thymic (severe being those with a distinct score on alexithymia measures) is one in which the essential links between patient and therapist are broken and ruptured, and in which verbalization and apparent efforts at communication are actually designed to destroy meaning, generate falsifications, and to create impenetrable barriers to underlying catastrophic truths. The type C communicative mode is designed for falsification, the destruction of links between subject and object, and for the erection of barriers designed to seal of inner and international chaos. [Lang] Henry Krystal: In the type C field, which corresponds to the alexi thymic, the trend is to non-communication, for the destruction of meaning, and the absence of derivative expression. Obviously the noncommunicative attitude of alexi thymic patients corresponds to Langs Type C field. [Integration and Self Healing]


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