Negation

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.