Free association studies of repression
Nikolai Axmacher
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neuropsychology, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Repression is a central concept of psychoanalysis, but difficult to operationalize experimentally. Previous studies have used voluntary forgetting tasks such as the Think/No-Think or the Directed forgetting paradigm, but those do not capture the automatic, stimulus-driven nature of repression. We followed a different reasoning and operationalized repression via free association paradigms similar to those initially conducted by C.G. Jung. In a series of studies combining skin-conductance recordings and functional MRI, we explored the neural processes during free association to subsequently forgotten items. In an attempt to approach repression in a clinically meaningful sense, we are studying not only free association to simple word lists and potentially conflict-related sentences, but also to individualized conflict sentences and to dream contents. Our results converge in a neuropsychoanalytic model of repression as a process by which areas relevant for conflict processing such as the anterior cingulate cortex down-regulate activity of a system for declarative memory in the medial temporal lobes.Â