IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

Back to Table of Contents

subjected to the primary process of the unconscious with the result that words become concrete or thing-like. Freud took this observation to mean that what was earlier described as a conscious presentation of the object must be differentiated into presentations of words and presentations of things respectively. The conscious idea includes the thing-presentation and the word- presentation belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation, with its hallucinatory quality, is characterized by only thing-presentation. The German wording of what we are to understand by thing presentation is worth noting: Freud talks of “ Sachbesetzungen der Objekte ” (thing- cathexes of the objects) indicating that in the unconscious there is no distinction between the thing and the representation of the thing. However, one cannot, in the state of alert focused consciousness, reproduce the thing-quality of the unconscious; one can only passively await its appearance. Through this era , Freud was engaging ideas from the earlier period in new contexts and starting to develop ideas, which would become fully systematized only in the next stage of theory development. “A Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (Freud, 1905a), which forms a conceptual link between “The Interpretation of Dreams” and “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”, in regard to infantile sexuality, is also notable for its pioneering attention to the dynamically unconscious phenomenon of transference . In “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905b) Freud explored the stages of psychosexual development and infantile (unconscious) sexuality . The intricacies of sidestepping the censorship with modified use of the primary process ambiguities and partial freeing of the instinctual impulses in jokes is thoroughly investigated in “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905c). In “Totem and Taboo” (1912-1913) Freud discussed the transformation of unconscious hostility into excessive affection (p. 49), as well as the unconscious projection of hostility onto the deceased, as follows: “The hostility, of which the survivors… wish to know nothing, is ejected from internal perception into the external world… It is no longer true that they are rejoicing to be rid of the dead man; on the contrary, they are mourning for him; but… he has turned into a wicked demon… eager to kill them. It then becomes necessary for… the survivors, to defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are relieved of pressure from within, but have only exchanged it for oppression from without” (pp.62-63). The text is an exquisite exposition of the phylogenetic schemata that manifest through primal fantasies , as one of the contents of the unconscious. In “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918) Freud referred to the difficulty young children experience in discriminating between what is conscious and what is unconscious, and what is a ‘ reality ’ and what is a ‘ fantasy ’. The difficulty arises because “the system Cs is still in the process of development” (p.105). This is a further elaboration on the dual nature of the mind in development, which Freud already theorized about three years earlier, when writing on the communication between the systems Cs and Ucs: “A sharp and

970

Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online