Concept
Displacement
Emotional intensity shifted from a significant idea to an indifferent one.
Development
1900
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In Die Traumdeutung Freud describes displacement (Verschiebung) as the second great operation of the dream-work: psychical intensity is shifted from the essential dream-thoughts onto indifferent elements, so that the dream is centred elsewhere than its latent content, a distortion he attributes to the censorship.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
1905
developed by Sigmund Freud
Carries displacement over from the dream to hysterical symptom formation: Dora’s disgust and the pressure she feels on her chest are sensations displaced from the genitals, from the lower body to the upper, and the jewel-case of her first dream is read as a product of condensation and displacement.
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In Die Traumdeutung Freud describes displacement (Verschiebung) as the second great operation of the dream-work: psychical intensity is shifted from the essential dream-thoughts onto indifferent elements, so that the dream is centred elsewhere than its latent content, a distortion he attributes to the censorship.
- 1905 developed by Sigmund Freud
Carries displacement over from the dream to hysterical symptom formation: Dora’s disgust and the pressure she feels on her chest are sensations displaced from the genitals, from the lower body to the upper, and the jewel-case of her first dream is read as a product of condensation and displacement.
- 1957 gave rise to Metonymy
Lacan reads Freud's displacement (Verschiebung) in the dream-work as metonymy: the shift of significance from one element to the next along the chain, which the unconscious uses to evade censorship. Condensation he reads in the same way as metaphor.
Works
- 1900
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1966
Lacan's collected papers, published by Éditions du Seuil in 1966: a volume of some nine hundred pages gathering articles and essays written over three decades, from 1936 to 1966. It includes the text on the mirror stage given at Zurich in 1949; the Rome discourse of 1953, 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', which has been called the founding manifesto of Lacanianism; 'The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious' (1957); and the 1958 essay on the treatment of psychosis. Across these papers Lacan pursues his return to Freud by way of structural linguistics, reading the unconscious as structured like a language, and turns against the ego psychology of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein. The book became a bestseller in France and made Lacan known as 'the French Freud', while also fixing his reputation for difficulty. Its first complete English translation, by Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, was published by W. W. Norton in 2006.
See also
People
References
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905Evidence for a relation
- Écrits1966Evidence for a relation
- The Interpretation of Dreams1900Evidence for a relation