Mansion House Counselling Practice

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me” - Sigmund Freud (born 6 May 1856, died 23 September 1939)

Central to Freud’s account of the mind was the theory of the unconscious, not discovered by Freud, but by the poets, philosophers and writers that preceded him. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, all had described the importance of unconscious feelings and thoughts. But for Freud the unconscious was not just about latent thoughts and emotions, it was also a realm of the mind with it’s own impulses, it’s own mode of expression and it’s own mechanisms.

One of these mechanisms is ‘repression’. Freud believed that conscious thoughts and emotions, when unbearable to the conscious mind, are repressed. The problem with repression is that this is not a one-off event, self contained and easily forgotten. Instead it is a continuous event requiring a great deal of energy to sustain the illusion that the thought and emotion no longer exists. At the same time the repressed thoughts and emotions seek to find alternative methods of expression, symbolic expressions of the original pain. These often manifest as phobias, obsessions, nightmares...

Finding ways to release the repressed emotions and alleviate the strain of keeping the pain at bay is what Freud hoped to achieve with his ‘talking cure’ of Psychotherapy.

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways” - Sigmund Freud