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.
Development
1925
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Negation (1925)
Relations
- 1925 introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1971 diverged into Denial
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.
Works
- 1925
Negation (1925) is a short paper of four pages in Imago. It starts from a clinical observation and ends with a theory of the origin of judgement. When a patient says that a figure in his dream is not his mother, the analyst may set the negation aside and keep the content: the idea has occurred to the patient, but he disowns it. In the same way, what a patient calls the least likely possibility is nearly always the truth. Freud concludes that a repressed idea can reach consciousness on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognisance of the repressed. It is already a kind of lifting of the repression, but not an acceptance of what is repressed. Here the intellectual function separates from the affective process, and an intellectual acceptance can be reached while the essence of the repression persists. To deny something in a judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression, and its 'no' is a mark of where it comes from. The function of judgement makes two decisions. The judgement of attribution goes back to the oral language of the earliest drives, to take something in or spit it out; for the original pleasure-ego, the bad, the alien and the external are at first identical. The judgement of existence belongs to the later reality-ego. Reality-testing seeks to find again in perception an object that was once present and satisfying, which presupposes that such objects have been lost. Thinking is a trial action carried out with small expenditures of energy. Affirmation, as a substitute for uniting, belongs to Eros; negation, the successor of expulsion, belongs to the destructive drive. The symbol of negation gives thinking a first independence from the consequences of repression and from the compulsion of the pleasure principle. This fits the finding that analysis never discovers a 'no' in the unconscious, and that the strongest confirmation of an uncovered unconscious content is the patient's reply that he had not, or never, thought of it.
- 1993
André Green's book on the negative in psychoanalysis. The notion comes from Hegel; Lacan brought it into psychoanalysis in his reinterpretation of Freud and later dropped it. Green gathers under the work of the negative repression, foreclosure, disavowal and negation, together with splitting and negative hallucination, to show what unites them while distinguishing their effects, which best reveal the subject's structure and shape the outcome of an analysis. After comparing Hegel and Freud, he traces the negative where it usually goes unrecognised in Freud, as in dream-work, mourning and identification, and follows Freud's clinical path from neurosis as the negative of perversion to the masochism behind the negative therapeutic reaction, whose pessimism he reads as typical of borderline structures. Later chapters treat the death drive, negative narcissism and the disobjectalising function, masochism in analytic failures, splitting in borderline cases, negative hallucination and sublimation. The negative is not only pathological: the drive in excess has to be refused for a person to belong to the human community. The book ends by asking why, for some, this no becomes a refusal to live. Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1993, it appeared in Andrew Weller's English translation as The Work of the Negative (1999).
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Analysis of the Self1971Evidence for a relation
- The Work of the Negative1993Evidence for a relation
- Negation1925Evidence for a relation