217

Glossary

Ætiology: causation, particularly of disease.

Affect: pertaining to the feeling bases of emotion.

Ambivalence: the coexistence of opposed feelings, par
ticularly love and hate.

Amnesia: failure of memory.

Cathexis: the process whereby ideas and mental attitudes
are invested with a “charge” of emotion.

Imago: a German periodical devoted to the non-medical
application of psychoanalysis.

Instinctual: pertaining to instinct.

Masochism: the obtaining of sexual pleasure in conjunc
tion with suffering.

Obsessional neurosis: a neurosis characterized by the alter
nation of obsessive (compulsive) ideas and doubts.

Onanism: auto-erotic activity, the commonest example
being masturbation.

218

GLOSSARY

Phylogenetic: pertaining to racial development.

Reaction-formation: development of a character trait that
keeps in check and conceals another one, usually of
the exactly opposite kind.

Regression: reversion to an earlier kind of mental life.

Repetition-compulsion: the tendency to repeat, which
Freud considers the most fundamental characteristic
of the mind.

Repression: the keeping of unacceptable ideas from con-
sciousness—i.e., in the “unconscious.”

Sadism: the obtaining of sexual pleasure through the in-
fliction of suffering.

Super-Ego: the self-criticizing part of the mind out of
which the conscience develops.

Trauma: injury, bodily or mental.