Is it possible to ban unwanted thoughts from consciousness? According to the literature on thought suppression, the answer is no. In the 1980s, Wegner and colleges demonstrated that the average person cannot prevent a trivial thought like that of a polar bear from entering consciousness approximately seven times in a five minute period. This experimental finding was followed by a substantial number of replications. This book provides an up-to-date overview of the thought suppression literature. First, similarities and differences between suppression, repression, and dissociation are...