Concept
Negation
A defensive procedure in which a repressed thought, wish or feeling reaches consciousness in negated form, as in ‘it is not my mother’, so that the subject acknowledges its content intellectually while still disowning it. Freud described it in 1925 as a lifting of repression that stops short of accepting what was repressed.
- Broader concept
- Defense
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 3
- Related
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1925 In Die Verneinung Freud shows that a repressed content can enter consciousness on condition that it is negated ('it is not my mother'): negation is a way of taking cognisance of the repressed, a lifting of repression though not an acceptance of it. He goes on to derive the function of judgement from the drives.
diverged into
- Denial 1971 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.
gave rise to
- Work of the negative Green's work of the negative widens Freud's negation, together with repression, disavowal and other forms of saying no, into one category of psychic operations.