IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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fused with erotic components, in part they are diverted towards an external world in the form of aggression, while to a large extent they undoubtedly continue their internal work unhindered” and he added, “the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal’s inclination to aggressiveness against the ego” (ibid, p.54). Ego is an organization, striving for synthesis, a ‘peacemaker’ mitigating between conflicting tendencies of Id and Superego, and an ‘ambassador’, striving for compromise between three psychic agencies/systems of the Id, Ego and Superego, and the external world. Full exposition of the unconscious inter-systemic conflict between the three systems/structures of the mind – Id, Ego and Superego – and the second theory of anxiety followed three years later, in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (Freud, 1926). Here, seat of anxiety is located within the Ego. Anxiety was now thought of as the motive for defense , not its result. Signal anxiety is a transformed rudimentary archaic traumatic anxiety, signaling dangers connected with the loss of the object, loss of the object’s love, castration, and the loss of internal acceptance/’love by superego’. Anxiety activated defenses, which were now firmly located within the unconscious Ego. The account of defenses continued to expand: in “Fetishism” (1927), Freud described ‘ disavowal ’, the unconscious belief of simultaneous knowing and not knowing (p.154). In “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense” (1940b [1938]), Freud, building on the mechanism of disavowal, discussed the unconscious splitting of the Ego at the expense of its synthetic function. Throughout , Freud’s revisiting his earliest ideas in the new context continued: In an exemplary demonstration of continuity between the earliest and the latest stages of the theory building, in “Constructions in Analysis ” Freud (1937a) returned to the thing- cathexes of objects in the unconscious, a hypothesis suggested already in 1895. In Studies on Hysteria, Freud (1895) had suggested that hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences also understood as internal “ foreign bodies ”. In 1937, this thesis is revisited by an observation that when he had proposed a construction, the patient reacted with an “ ultra-clear ” recollection, a Sachbesetzung der Objekte . Freud theorized these recollections to be hallucinations repeating psychic experiences from early childhood, which were later forgotten but now returned as such “ ultra-clear ” recollections. The “ ultra-clear ” recollection betrays the eruption of the unconscious as unmediated “presence”, a perceptual-sensory revival/return of an unverbalized or repressed rudimentary ‘thought’/fantasy. Another example of reviewing early ideas in the new context is “Moses and Monotheism” (Freud, 1939). Here, Freud depicted the fate of the Unconscious, memory and repression from a socio-historical angle, stating: ‘When Moses brought the people the idea of a single god, it was not a novelty but signified the revival of an experience in the primeval ages of the human family which had long vanished from men’s conscious memory…We have learnt from the psycho-analyses of individuals that their earliest impressions, received at a time when the child was scarcely yet capable of speaking, produce at some time or another effects of a compulsive character without themselves being consciously remembered. We believe we have a right to make the same assumption about the earliest experiences of the whole of humanity” (pp.129-130). In a Nachträglichkeit fashion, he also recapitulated the idea of the traumatic

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