Back to Table of Contents
dream-fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the whole quota of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one” (Freud, 1892-1899, p. 265). Never abandoning sexual trauma as etiological, Freud (1914, p. 17) would later state that “psychical reality requires to be taken in account alongside practical reality”, and, “Phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real memories” (1917, p. 370). Later, the concept of Nachträglichkeit was revived and extended in the seminal case of the Wolf Man (Freud, 1918). The challenge of articulating the impact of traumatic stimulation coming from outside in the form of perceptions with traumatic stimulation coming from the interior of the mind in the form of drives and fantasies preoccupied Freud throughout his writings. In a related development , from 1897 on, Freud gradually started outlining the rough contours of processes and mechanisms that govern the unconscious, later known as ‘primary process’. On July 7, 1897, he wrote: “I know roughly the rules in accordance with which these structures are put together and the reasons why they are stronger than genuine memories, and I have thus learnt fresh things to help in characterizing the processes in the Ucs” (Freud, 1892- 1899, p. 258). It is also during this era that he laid down the roots of his ‘first theory of anxiety’ (Freud, 1892-1899, pp. 189-195), which postulated not only direct transformation of the repressed libido into the affect of anxiety, but represented also the first recognition of, and causal connection between, anxiety and what came to be known later as the traumatic state. II. B. The Topographic Unconscious: The System Ucs 1900 – 1923 In the early topographical model of the psychic apparatus, the unconscious as a noun was characterized by having a certain content, consisting of repressed representatives of the drives, which work primarily through condensation and displacement in accordance with the primary process of free mobile energy. Only by being strongly invested with (‘cathected by’) libidinal energy can these unconscious ideas gain access to the preconscious/conscious system. Due to the censorship of the preconscious, this process will, however, always take the form of a compromise-formation evidenced by symptoms, dreams and parapraxes. It was mainly through the study of dreams that Freud realized that the unconscious has to be qualified, not only through the lack of consciousness but through its way of working, which led to his introduction of the important concept of primary processes. In chapter seven of “The Interpretation of Dreams” Freud noted the absurdity of the dream-work, which could not simply be ascribed to the work of the censorship. “Thus we are driven to conclude that two fundamentally different kinds of psychical process are concerned in the formation of dreams. One of these produces perfectly rational dream-thoughts, of no less validity than normal thinking; while the other treats these thoughts in a manner which is in the highest degree bewildering and irrational” (Freud 1900b, p. 597). Primary process and primary process unconscious symbolism of dreams is characterized by freely flowing psychical energy, which passes unhindered by means of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement. Owing to the freedom with which the energy can be transferred, intermediate ideas, which resemble
967
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online