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Green proposed gathering together such defense mechanisms as repression, splitting, disavowal, foreclosure or rejection and negation, in his formulation of the concept of the work of the negative , because he sees all of them as elaborations of the prototypical repression. In his view, all of them imply a judgment and acceptance or refusal: a question whose answer is yes and/or no. This question may be grounded in different contexts, dealing with various materials (instinctual impulses, affects, representations, perceptions, words, etc.). Among the various defense mechanisms, this group is different from the others because its constituents directly imply this basic choice of acceptance or refusal in the consciousness of derivatives that are rooted in the unconscious or the id. Writing on the borderline psychotic patients, Green notes two mechanisms, which lead to psychic blindness : somatic exclusion, where the regression dissociates the conflict from the psychic sphere to the soma, and expulsion (of the conflict) via action, its psychomotor counterpart. Additionally, splitting and decathexis present borderline patients’ dilemma of delusion or death (of the psychic process). Here, Increased attention to the subtleties of communication, optimal balance between unintrusive presence and absence, on part of the analyst, allowing for potential symbolization and representation processes to emerge, is called for. Drawing and expanding on Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan in her theory of childhood psychosis, Piera Aulagnier identified three levels of representation: primal pictogram primary process fantasy, and secondary process ideation. Primary process is activated to symbolize and represent the recognition of the existence of anther body’s presence and absence. In this function, it conflicts with the primal process (pictograms, created for themselves by themselves), which recognizes only one psychic space. The function of the primary process fantasy is to resolve this conflict (2001, p.40-42). In her study of ‘ Agieren’ , Joyce McDougall (1980) notes the English translation ‘acting out’ accurately reflects a two-fold notion of an economic order: first something is put outside (of oneself or of the analytic situation) which should have been kept in and dealt with psychologically; subsequently, tension is being drained out or away so that nothing of the internal conflict remains. Anxious or depressive affects, which might otherwise overwhelm the individual’s capacity to cope with them, are kept out of consciousness. In McDougall’s theory, it is a mechanism of ‘ foreclosure ’, approximating Freudian ‘ repudiation from the psyche’ (different from repression or denial) that mediates the economic maneuver of acting-out and discharge of tension. In her exploration of psychosomatic phenomena, McDougall describes that psychic conflict is disavowed and thrown out of the psyche to be discharged through the body and its somatic functioning instead. She theorizes that at the beginning of psychic life the body is experienced as an object belonging to the external world. This state of perception continues to exist in dream-life and in certain psychotic states, in which the whole body, or “certain of its
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