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 infant’s 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 intrapsychic experience’. As Kuchenhoff explains, ‘Such an exclusion of psychic representation brings about psychic stress that cannot be symbolized’.
The Essay on An experience that changed my life
Everyone has experience in their life. These experiences could be the incidents which has happened in someone else life or in our life. Some people learn lesson from their experiences and some experiences change the people’s life automatically. The topic I selected is about a tragic experience that happened in my life, during my early twenties. I was working for one of the largest retail companies ...
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 (1915a) 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, protosymbolically 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 Taylor’s (1973) proposal that people who somatize ‘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 tranforming 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.
The Essay on From your experience, which types of data collection methods are commonly used to create a faculty evaluation model and why?
Faculty evaluation models commonly use actual observation, interviews, and questionnaires (Marsh, & Roche, 1997). Teaching skills in the classroom can only be measured through observing the teacher as he/she conducts his/her lessons. Key teaching factors such as classroom management, facilitating skills and motivation strategies can be observed as it is applied in the classroom. However, ...
Though access to unmentalized experience may be gained often through analysis of countertransferrence responses to the projective identifications of alexithymic patients (Taylor 1977), severely alexithymic 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 patient’s internal world and the external real world. [This type of] alexithymic 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 interactionally concrete’. It is this type of patient who can paralyze the therapist’s analytic function and produce the prelonged periods of ‘stagnation’ described by McDougall (1972).
Though the alexithymia and syptomatology 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 patient’s 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 patient’s life. There is usually a paradoxical worsening in the patient’s 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’.]
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The Essay on Celiac Sprue Disease Gluten Patients Type
What if your doctor told you that eating a certain food say pizza would be devastating to your health You might not like it, but you'd learn to live with it. But what if it was more than just pizza What if you were told to avoid all bread, breadcrumbs, and pasta And dozens of breakfast cereals, canned soups, luncheon meats, and salad dressings And a wide variety of ice creams, ice cream cones, ...
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 represenations.
Primal repression may well be a factor common to a large proportion of high-scoring alexithymics, 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 alexithymic (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 interactional chaos.” [Lang]
Henry Krystal: In the type C field, which corresponds to the alexithymic, the trend is to “non-communication, for the destruction of meaning, and the absence of derivative expression.” Obviously the noncommunicative attitude of alexithymic patients corresponds to Lang’s Type C field. [Integration and Self Healing]
The Essay on The various types of communication
Types of communication People communicate with each other in a number of ways that depend upon the message and its context in which it is being sent. Choice of communication channel and your style of communicating also affect communication. So, there is variety of types of communication. Types of communication based on the communication channels used are: 1.Verbal Communication: Verbal ...