Forbidden issues and prohibitions, from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Psychoanalysis has, since its inception, been a discipline concerned with overcoming the ill effects of certain social taboos. Freud conjured up a vision of people struggling with impulses and wishes that had become forbidden largely because of social conventions or taboos against sexual impulses) Mitchell & Black, 1996, p.54). His understanding of the underlying causes of the emotional disturbances of his hysterical patients was that they were suffering from the effects of repressing desires, due to these taboos (Bohm, 2018, xix).
In his early work, Freud explored social taboos through the lens of the seduction theory. This theory claims that forbidden content, which is repressed, relates to actual experiences. This view considers repressed memories as memories that cannot be accessed by the conscious mind due to their traumatizing nature. In abandoning the theory of seduction in favor of the theory of Oedipal desire, Freud transferred the responsibility for the forbidden content to females, who were then viewed as transgressing social norms. Consequently, the repressed content, which was forbidden from reaching awareness, was not perceived as reality but rather as deriving from forbidden Oedipal fantasies. Winnicott, several decades after Freud, made a connection between parental and social prohibitions and psychopathology in his presentation of the theory of the false self. The etiology of the false self develops in the early mother–infant relationship, and the mother’s contribution is crucial. A True Self begins to have life, through the strength given to the infant’s weak ego by the mother’s implementation of the infant’s omnipotent expressions (Winnicott, 1960, p. 145). Whereas a True Self feels real, the existence of a False Self results in feelings of unreality or a sense of futility (ibid., p. 148). In Winnicott’s view, psychopathologies are often the result of social boundaries and intrapsychic inhibitions that restrict the expression of an individual’s true self. Winnicott viewed the false self as a structure that develops to defend the true self, even—or especially—at the healthy end (Abram, 1997, p. 304).
In Winnicott’s language, compliance is always associated with dimensions of life dominated by the false-self and is connected with despair rather than hope. Compliance brings immediate rewards and adults only too easily mistake compliance for growth (Winnicott, 1962, p. 102). However, Winnicott argues that there is a true and a false self within each person and that the balance between them is what contributes to the development of a healthy self: “…each person has a polite or socialized self, and also a personal private self that is not available except in intimacy. This is what is commonly found, and we could call it normal. If you look around, you can see that in health this splitting of the self is an achievement of personal growth; in illness the split is a matter of a schism in the mind…” (Winnicott, 1986, p. 66). Thus, Winnicott argues that internal prohibitions arise when a person cannot express his spontaneous, authentic gestures, needs, and desires in his interpersonal relationships, beginning with the initial relationship with his mother. It is in this situation that a false self emerges, responding to the desires and needs of others while preventing the expression of one’s individual and authentic needs.