The concept of psychological defense has been important to psychology ever since Breuer and Freud (1895/1955) first explained how repression works:“The basis for repression... can only be a feeling of unpleasure, the incompatibility between the single idea that is repressed and the dominant mass of ideas constituting the ego”(p. 116). Breuer and Freud went on to say that “when this process occurs for the first time there comes into being a nucleus and center of crystallization for the formation of a psychical group divorced from the ego—a ...
