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the Id there are no representations. The Id is made up of sexual and aggressive instinctual impulses, previously described in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud, 1920). In later Freud´s metaphor, the Id is “a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations” (Freud, 1933 p. 73). In contrast to the Id, the Ego has been used throughout Freud´s writings, but is hereby further refined through the development in his thinking, building on his previous introduction of the concepts of narcissism and identification (Freud, 1914b). Among substantial changes in the organization of the Ego in 1923 is the full recognition of unconscious ego functioning , roots of which go back to 1895. Then, Freud had evoked the image of “an infiltrate” to describe the difficulty separating “the pathogenic organization” from the ego itself in remarking that “In fact the pathogenic organization does not behave like a foreign body, but far more like an infiltrate. In this simile the resistance must be regarded as what is infiltrating” (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895, p 290). In the new Structural model, many previously identified defense mechanisms (identification, incorporation, projection, introjection, reaction-formation, undoing, regression, etc.), different from, and in addition to, repression, are further systematized and clearly located in the unconscious ego. The possibility of other forms of defense had a long history going back to the 1890s. At that time Freud (1894, 1896) had introduced a type of defense that had more radical regressive pathogenic implications for psychic balance than the repression seen in neurotic patients. This intuition was made more explicit in Freud´s (1911c) study of the Schreber case with the introduction of the mechanism of “repudiation” or “rejection ” by the ego ( Verwerfung) , a drastic process for which later Lacan would invent the term “ foreclosure ” . This non-neurotic mechanism of defense was taken up again in the Wolf-Man (Freud, 1918) and posited as a process of erasure or deletion of the mind’s ability to represent. This process is much more than censorship or repression, it is rather representational abolishment causing a hole or emptiness in the mind. This line of thinking was supplemented when Freud in 1925 (1925h) introduced the mechanism of negation [ Verneinung ] and further on when in 1927 (1927) he described the splitting of the ego [ Ich Spaltung ], a concept he would take up again in his text on “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense” (1940 [1938]). As long as Freud worked within the model of the unconscious as system, attempting to unveil what was repressed through the act of interpretation, the unconscious was apprehended in its ‘positive’ forms of content such as fantasy, wishes, thoughts etc. With the introduction of the ‘negative’ forms of defense, Freud´s view of the ego was substantially altered. Alongside the sexual disturbances of the neurotics, he now included a potential form of perversion of the functions of the ego. These are the disturbances one may observe as “the inconsistencies, eccentricities and follies of men” (1924, p. 153). It has been mainly post-Freudian writers who have teased out the principle of the ‘negative’ as a basic assumption throughout Freud’s writings. Bion (“negative capability”), Lacan (the word as absence of the thing), Green (“the work of the negative”), Zaltzman (“the anarchist impulse”), and others recognized that the unconscious is not only a hidden presence/striving for representation but is equally constituted by powerful forms of absence, ascriptions both protective and destructive.
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