An Experimental Study of Repression

The concept of repression is commonly referred to in terms of pleasant and unpleasant material. We say that an individual will tend to remember pleasant experiences and will tend to forget or repress unpleasant experiences. Many of the investigators doing research in this field have failed to look into the meaning of the word unpleasant as it is used by Freud, and have mistakenly used affective tone as a criterion. The present study has been conducted on the basis of this interpretation of the term repression, with the emphasis on first determining the frame of reference of the subject, rather than assuming that a given experience by its affective tone will lead to repression