A Return of the Repressed from the Topeka Menninger Foundation Days

The fate of repression in our patients and in ourselves, its tendency to relent for a time and then reassert itself, is the focus of this report. In this instance, the patient, a young woman in her twenties, was a subject some thirty-five years ago in a subliminal experiment conducted by the author to investigate decompensating repressive defenses. She revealed remarkable insights into her struggles with repression that were partly mirrored in the experimental results. The author quite recently returned to his notes on the experiment with a view to publishing it as a paper. He discovered that he had repressed the fact that he had already published it. Moreover, he also discovered that he had repressed an important finding. The relation between the patient's struggle and the investigator's own defenses is examined as an instance of the connection between scientific insight and repression.