Neural activity during free association to conflict-related sentences.

Psychodynamic conflicts form an important construct to understand the genesis and maintenance of mental disorders. Conflict-related themes should therefore provoke strong reactions on the behavioral, physiological, and neural level. We confronted N = 18 healthy subjects with a vast array of sentences describing typical psychodynamic conflict themes in the fMRI scanner and let them associate spontaneously in reaction.

Can the neural basis of repression be studied in the MRI scanner? New insights from two free association paradigms.

Background: The psychodynamic theory of repression suggests that experiences which are related to internal conflicts become unconscious. Previous attempts to investigate repression experimentally were based on voluntary, intentional suppression of stimulus material. Unconscious repression of conflict-related material is arguably due to different processes, but has never been studied with neuroimaging methods.