Concept
Denial
Refusing to acknowledge an aspect of external reality or of one’s own experience.
Development
1923
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud gave disavowal (Verleugnung) its specific sense from 1923, when he described how children faced with the absence of a penis in girls deny the lack and believe they see one all the same; in his later writings on fetishism and splitting of the ego it becomes a defence against a perception of reality.
In The Infantile Genital Organization (1923)
1952
developed by Melanie Klein
Counts denial, with splitting, omnipotence and idealization, among the processes that prevail in the first months of life, the paranoid-schizoid position, and traces the transference back to these earliest processes.
In The Origins of Transference (1952)
1971
reworked by Heinz Kohut
Uses Freud’s term disavowal for a ‘vertical split’ in the personality: archaic grandiose demands stay conscious but are walled off from the reality ego and exist side by side with it, unlike the ‘horizontal split’ by which repression keeps them unconscious.
In The Analysis of the Self (1971)
Relations
- 1923 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud gave disavowal (Verleugnung) its specific sense from 1923, when he described how children faced with the absence of a penis in girls deny the lack and believe they see one all the same; in his later writings on fetishism and splitting of the ego it becomes a defence against a perception of reality.
- 1952 developed by Melanie Klein
Counts denial, with splitting, omnipotence and idealization, among the processes that prevail in the first months of life, the paranoid-schizoid position, and traces the transference back to these earliest processes.
- 1971 reworked by Heinz Kohut
Uses Freud’s term disavowal for a ‘vertical split’ in the personality: archaic grandiose demands stay conscious but are walled off from the reality ego and exist side by side with it, unlike the ‘horizontal split’ by which repression keeps them unconscious.
- 1971 diverges from Repression
Kohut sets the vertical split maintained by disavowal, in which incompatible attitudes coexist in consciousness, against the horizontal split of repression, which keeps the material unconscious.
- 1971 diverges from Negation
Kohut distinguishes the vertical split of disavowal from the horizontal splits produced at a deeper level by repression and at a higher level by negation, in Freud’s 1925 sense.
Works
- 1923
The Infantile Genital Organization
A short paper of 1923, subtitled "An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality", in which Freud corrects a passage of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. There he had held that infantile sexuality resembles the adult form in its object choice but lacks, or only imperfectly achieves, the primacy of the genitals. He now argues that at the height of infantile sexual development interest in the genitals and genital activity become dominant, hardly less than in maturity. What sets this infantile genital organization apart is that for both sexes only one genital, the male one, is taken into account: there is no genital primacy but a primacy of the phallus. Freud says he can describe the process only in the boy. The boy assumes that every being has an organ like his own and directs his sexual curiosity at it. When he discovers that girls lack it, he first denies what he saw, then supposes it will grow, and at last concludes that it was there and was taken away, through castration. Freud holds that the castration complex can be understood only from this origin in the phase of phallic primacy, and traces to it much of men's contempt for and horror of women, citing Ferenczi's reading of the Medusa's head. The child generalizes the lack only slowly, keeping the penis for respected women such as the mother until his theories of birth, and the vagina remains undiscovered. The paper ends by tracing how the polarity of the sexes changes through development: subject and object, active and passive in the sadistic-anal organization, phallic and castrated in the infantile genital organization, and male and female only at puberty.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Origins of Transference1952Evidence for a relation
- The Analysis of the Self1971Evidence for a relation
- The Infantile Genital Organization1923Evidence for a relation