JOURNAL OF METAPSYCHOLOGY

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Article 5
February 25, 1987

Pain and Repression

 

No discussion of human potential would be complete without addressing the question of pain.  We shall see, pain has a lot to do with unconsciousness, so if we are after more awareness, we will have to confront the issue of pain head-on.
"Pain", as we use the term, does not just mean a physical sensation. Under varying circumstances, certain sensations can be felt as painful or not -- sometimes as intensely pleasurable. For instance, in a state of sexual or religious ecstasy, physical sensations normally thought of as painful can even enhance the ecstasy. For most women, the sensations of childbirth are intensely painful, but some women assert that they can be intensely pleasurable. Exercise is painful for some and pleasurable for others. Heroin addicts undergoing withdrawal may gain exquisite pleasure from pricking themselves with needles.
What appears to convert a mere sensation or perception into pain is one's unwillingness to experience it. Pain is undesirable by definition. If an experience is tolerable or pleasant, it is not painful. For instance, most people are unwilling to experience injury to their bodies. Childbirth is felt as painful if one views it as the injury, through stretching and rending of tissues, of one's body. On the other hand, when it is truly viewed as a natural, non-injurious process, the sensations associated with it can be viewed merely as extreme sensations or (reportedly) can be felt as ecstatic.
Pain, in other words, is basically intolerance of experience. Pain is the presence of something to which a being has aversion.

In other words, pain is aversion to something that is present or close by. We may have an intense aversion to something but not experience pain, provided the thing is sufficiently distant. The presence of people or things we dislike is, to a varying degree, painful to us. Pain can range from a mild discomfort to intense agony. The quality of the pain varies with the emotions associated with it (anger, grief, ambivalence, etc.) and the nature of the painful person, object or situation, while the quantity of the pain varies with the degree of aversion towards the painful person, object, or situation, and with its importance in our lives. We say things like, "He is a real pain." While such statements are perhaps meant to be metaphorical, it is quite literally true that such a person's presence is felt as painful, to a degree.

 Some pains appear to be "built-in". These are uncomfortable bodily sensations that under normal circumstances cannot be readily confronted without having a relatively strong intention to do so. Others appear to be "situational", though they may be no less intense in some circumstances. These are the discomforts associated with various situations a being encounters in life -- discomforts connected with misdeeds, dangerous secrets, boredom, and so forth. Situational pain is based on the intolerability of experiences other than the sensation of physical pain or discomfort.

For "built-in" pain, the aversion is often caused by an intolerance of too high an intensity of sensory input, an intensity that threatens to damage sensory organs or to overwhelm the being with its intensity. Often, too, it is caused by certain types of sensory input, such as nausea, certain odors, the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, the feeling of a full bladder or rectum, the feeling of hunger (apart from actual hunger pains), or the sensation of "physical pain" in its various forms. These "built-in" aversions appear to be inherited genetically as part of our bodily identity. They are clearly conducive to organismic survival.  The physical pain associated with appendicitis can be life saving, in that it gives warning before a fatal rupture and massive infection can occur.  Physical pain than aids survival by causing an aversion to things that are physically damaging to the organism. A dog scratched by a raccoon will (rightly) avoid raccoons in the future. So physical pain does have real usefulness.
Pain and unconsciousness are closely related, in that a flinch, or an aversion, is an "averting" of one's attention, a lowering of awareness, a turning away.

 After assuming a particular identity,  each of us tends, more or less automatically, to screen out an awareness of things that don't have to do with that identity.

Generally speaking, this type of unawareness consists of unawareness caused by a decision to attend to something else, along with the fact that there is a limit to how much we can attend to at the same time. If we shift identities, we can become aware of things we ignored previously.

In Gestalt psychology terms, by choosing to be aware of the figure, we become relatively unaware of the ground, and by attending to the ground, what was the ground becomes the figure, and the former figure becomes the new ground.

Directed unawareness -- is unawareness based on aversion, from pain? It is unconsciousness of a specific concept or phenomenon, and it is brought about by the presence of that phenomenon or by the presence of a related (similar) concept or phenomenon. While turning towards something else causes simple unawareness, directed unawareness is caused by pointedly turning away from the thing of which one is unconscious.   You have to know that something is there in order to know where not to look. It is rather like trying not to think of a pink elephant. It is this kind of unawareness that can be detrimental to a being's achievement of the kind of world he wants to have. We will refer to directed unawareness, following Freud, as "repression".
In order to help a person become more aware of a fact or situation that the person has repressed, the person’s aversion to the various underlying truths in the area must be handled. Aversion or pain can be regarded as a transition stage from consciousness of something to a directed unconsciousness or repression of that thing. It is a transition, because one is still (while the pain exists) in contact with the thing, and one still has a choice of whether to move towards it or to back off. Pain or flinching is an attempt or intention to reject, or separate from, a fact, activity, or identity. It should be noted that repressing something is not the only way of getting away from that to which a being has an aversion. He can also run away, hide, throw away (or throw out) the hated object or person, or get it or him out of his space in a variety of ways. These are the physical equivalents of the process of repression, which is just a mental attempt to throw away something that is unwanted.
 A being can make a choice of activity or identity for reasons other than an overwhelming aversion. In the case of deciding what is true or what exists, before that choice or decision is made, no truth yet exists, to which the being could have an aversion, and there is no contradiction involved in deciding that a certain one of a group of possible truths is true, or in deciding to have a certain kind of experience instead of other kinds of experience. A person is always making choices about what to do, what to have, and what to be, and there is nothing wrong or disabling about that.
 If you reject something hard enough, mentally, you are no longer aware of it, but it's still there, and you may well find yourself running into it later. In other words, the problem with a being's attempt to throw away facts by repression is that no one ever empties the garbage! It just piles up, and in being there; it uses the being's personal resources or vitality. If you shove garbage under the beds, it may disappear, but you might start smelling it after awhile, and you might wonder what it was that you were smelling. Or you might move the bed, and suddenly -- there's the garbage! The force of one's unchanged agreement on the existence of something that's rejected or repressed (rather than just actually removed or destroyed or no longer agreed upon) causes it to continue to exist and continue to affect you, apparently without your consent.
In the mental realm, aversion or rejection is a refusal to be aware of something. One manifestation of mental aversion is forgetting. Repression is the mental equivalent of losing something or throwing something under the carpet. Like physical garbage, mental garbage may eventually have an untoward effect on a being. You can never get rid of something you can't or won't admit is there. The only way to get rid of it is to overcome your aversion for it, become fully aware of it, and accept it, at which point you can understand it. Then, like a problem that has been solved, it will be gone. If a person has a particularly difficult math assignment to do and is repressing the fact that he has that assignment, so long as he continues to repress that fact, the assignment remains undone and continues to bother the person, at least on a subliminal level. When the person confronts the fact that the assignment exists, accepts the existence of the assignment, then he can either decide that the assignment is not important, or he can work on the assignment (getting help, if needed) until it is completed, at which point, the problem of having an undone assignment no longer exists. Since there is no other garbage collector for repressed items, an individual has to burn all his own garbage in the fire of his perception, acceptance, understanding, and constructive action. If he does that, he will find that the vitality that was tied up in the garbage will be reclaimed for more useful purposes.
Next, the person may have in mind various possible interpretations but may refuse to verify (or falsify) any of them. The wife knows her husband might have a lover, but doesn't want to find out whether it's true or not, so she doesn't take any steps to check up on him.
Often, a combination of denial or uncertainty and misinterpretation or misverification occurs. "It looks as though he's been stepping out on me, but it must be just a child playing with lipstick," or "He looks drunk, but he must be tired or sick." This is called "rationalization". Likewise, when a being is uncertain, he may feel himself unable to choose amongst two or more interpretations, one of which is the "correct" one: "It might just be a child playing with lipstick, or he might be stepping out on me. I just don't know". "He might be drunk, or he might be tired, or he might be sick. I can't decide." It is, of course, OK not to decide something if you don't have enough data. But the sign that a failure to decide is a form of repression is that the indecisive person doesn't take any effective steps to resolve the indecision, yet continues to worry about it.
So material can simply be repressed ("forgotten"), or an alteration or contrary assertion can be introduced to aid the process of repression. In this way, a being can acquire delusions:

A delusion is a falsehood introduced in the act of repression in order to hide the repressed material.

Delusion is thus a means of repressing. A being decides something. Then, for some reason, the fact he has decided on causes him pain, so he becomes directedly unaware of it (represses it) and makes a second decision that contradicts the first and is therefore a falsehood, a delusion. Since the first decision is only repressed, not unmade, it remains, but the being is only aware of the second decision. This decision, in turn, can be repressed and overlaid by a third decision, the third by a fourth, and so forth, to an indefinite number of layers of delusion.

If we are able to raise the level of awareness, we can peel off these layers of falsehood and arrive at the relative truth that underlies each layer of falsehood. Each layer is "truer" or more "fundamental", as we move towards the first decision. The third is truer than the fourth, the second is truer than the third, and the first is truest of all. A person increasing in awareness in a certain area will have a series of new realizations or "cognitions":

A cognition (verb: cognize) is a realization, an acquisition of knowledge.
An insight is cognition of an underlying truth.

Thus we can see that insight is the opposite of delusion. In both insight and delusion, the being changes his idea of what is factual. In the case of delusion, the being introduces a layer of untruth; in the case of insight, the being removes a layer of untruth to uncover the underlying truth.

In order to help a person become more aware of a fact or situation that the being has repressed, the person’s aversion to the various underlying truths in the area, i.e. the pain in the area, must be handled. It does little good to adopt a strategy of trying to find underlying truths if the reason for the introduction of falsehood remains unhandled, because that reason will then be a reason for resisting the method you are using for increasing awareness. The being must be brought to the point of being able to confront the painful area sufficiently to perceive the truth in the area. Then insight will come spontaneously. Otherwise, it is likely that more layers of delusion will be introduced. The way in which we can use metapsychological principles to help the being to confront his pain and to acquire insight and ability is called "viewing".
 

Frank A. Gerbode, M.D.
Director, IRM