Freud, Sigmund (1925-003/1925.en): Negation

367

ORIGINAL PAPERS

NEGATION

BY

SIGMUND FREUD

VIENNA

The manner in which our patients bring forward their associations
during the work of analysis gives us an opportunity for making some
interesting observations. ‘Now you’ll think I mean to say something
insulting, but really I’ve no such intention.’ We see at once that this is
a repudiation, by means of projection, of an association that has just
emerged. Or again : ‘You ask who this person in the dream can have
been. It was not my mother’. We emend this: so it was his mother.
In our interpretation we take the liberty of disregarding the negation
and of simply picking out the subject-matter of the association. It is
just as though the patient had said : ‘It is true that I thought of my
mother in connection with this person, but I don’t feel at all inclined
to allow the association to count’.

There is a most convenient method by which one can sometimes
obtain a necessary light upon a piece of unconscious and repressed
material. ‘What’, one asks, ‘would you consider was about the most
unlikely thing in the world in that situation? What do you think was
furthest from your mind at the time?’ If the patient falls into the trap
and names what he thinks most incredible, he almost invariably in so
doing makes the correct admission. A nice counterpart of this experi-
ment is often met with in obsessional neurotics who have been
initiated into the meaning of their symptoms. ‘A new obsessive idea
came over me ; and it immediately occurred to me that it might mean
so and so. But of course that can’t be true, or it couldn’t have occurred

368

to me.’ The explanation of the new obsessive idea, which he rejects in
this way upon grounds picked up from the treatment, is of course the
right one.

Thus the subject-matter of a repressed image or thought can make
its way into consciousness on condition that it is denied. Negation is a
way of taking account of what is repressed; indeed, it is actually a
removal of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what
is repressed. It is to be seen how the intellectual function is here
distinct from the affective process. Negation only assists in undoing
one of the consequences of repression–namely, the fact that the
subject-matter of the image in question is unable to enter conscious-
ness. The result is a kind of intellectual acceptance of what is repressed,
though in all essentials the repression persists.¹ In the course of ana-
lytic work we often bring about a further very important and some-
what bewildering change in the same situation. We succeed in also
defeating the negation and in establishing a complete intellectual
acceptance of what is repressed–but the repression itself is still not
removed.

Since it is the business of the function of intellectual judgement
to affirm or deny the subject-matter of thoughts, we have been led by
the foregoing remarks to the psychological origin of that function.
To deny something in one’s judgement is at bottom the same thing as
to say: ‘That is something that I would rather repress’. A negative
judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression; the ‘No’ in
which it is expressed is the hall-mark of repression, a certificate of origin,
as it were, like ‘Made in Germany’. By the help of the symbol of
negation, the thinking-process frees itself from the limitations of
repression and enriches itself with the subject-matter without which it
could not work efficiently.

The function of judgement is concerned ultimately with two sorts of
decision. It may assert or deny that a thing has a particular property;
or it may affirm or dispute that a particular image (Vorstellung) exists
in reality. Originally the property to be decided about might be either
good or bad, useful or harmful. Expressed in the language of the

¹The same process is at the root of the familiar superstition that boasting
is dangerous. ‘How lovely that I’ve not had one of my headaches for
such a long time!’ But this is in fact the first announcement of a new
attack, of whose approach the patient is already aware, though he is as yet
unwilling to believe it.

369

oldest, that is, of the oral, instinctual impulses, the alternative runs
thus: ‘I should like to eat that, or I should like to spit it out’; or,
carried a stage further: ‘I should like to take this into me and keep
that out of me’. That is to say: it is to be either inside me or outside
me. As I have shown elsewhere, the original pleasure-ego tries to
introject into itself everything that is good and to reject from itself
everything that is bad. From its point of view what is bad, what is
alien to the ego, and what is external are, to begin with, identical.²

The other sort of decision made by the function of judgement,
namely, as to the real existence of something imagined, is a concern of
the final reality-ego, which develops out of the previous pleasure-ego
(a concern, that is, of the faculty that tests the reality of things). It is
now no longer a question of whether something preceived (a thing)
shall be taken into the ego or not, but of whether something which is
present in the ego as an image can also be re-discovered in perception
(that is, in reality). Once more, it will be seen, the question is one of
external and internal. What is not real, what is merely imagined or
subjective, is only internal; while on the other hand what is real is
also present externally. When this stage is reached, the pleasure-
principle is no longer taken into account. Experience has taught that
it is important not only whether a thing (an object from which satis-
faction is sought) possesses the ‘good’ property, that is, whether it
deserves to be taken into the ego, but also whether it is there in the
external world, ready to be seized when it is wanted. In order to under-
stand this step forward, we must recollect that all images originate
from perceptions and are repetitions of them. So that originally the
mere existence of the image serves as a guarantee of the reality of what
is imagined. The contrast between what is subjective and what is
objective does not exist from the first. It only arises from the faculty
which thought possesses for reviving a thing that has once been per-
ceived, by reproducing it as an image, without its being necessary
for the external object still to be present. Thus the first and immediate
aim of the process of testing reality is not to discover an object in real
perception corresponding to what is imagined, but to re-discover such
an object, to convince oneself that it is still there. The differentiation
between what is subjective and what is objective is further assisted by
another faculty of the power of thought. The reproduction of a per-
 

²Cf. ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915), Collected Papers, Vol. IV,
1925.

370

ception as an image is not always a faithful one; it can be modified by
omissions or by the fusion of a number of elements. The process for
testing the thing’s reality must then investigate the extent of these
distortions. But it is evident that an essential pre-condition for the
institution of the function for testing reality is that objects shall have
been lost which have formerly afforded real satisfaction.

Judging is the intellectual action which decides the choice of motor
action, which puts an end to the procrastination of thinking, and which
leads over from thinking to acting. This procrastinating character of
thought, too, has been discussed by me elsewhere.³ Thought is to be
regarded as an experimental action, a kind of groping forward, in-
volving only a small expenditure of energy in the way of discharge.
Let us consider where the ego can have made a previous use of this
kind of groping forward, where it can have learnt the technique which
it now employs in thought-processes. It was at the sensory end of the
mental apparatus, in connection with sensory perceptions. For upon
our hypothesis perception is not a merely passive process; we
believe rather that the ego periodically sends out small amounts of
cathectic energy into the perceptual system and by their means
samples the external stimuli, and after every such groping advance
draws back again.

The study of judgement affords us, perhaps for the first time, an
insight into the derivation of an intellectual function from the inter-
play of the primary instinctual impulses. Judging has been syste-
matically developed out of what was in the first instance introduction
into the ego or expulsion from the ego carried out according to the
pleasure-principle. Its polarity appears to correspond to the opposition
between the two groups of instincts which we have assumed to exist.
Affirmation, as being a substitute for union, belongs to Eros; while
negation, the derivative of expulsion, belongs to the instinct of destruc-
tion. The passion for universal negation, the ‘negativism’ displayed
by many psychotics, is probably to be regarded as a sign of a ‘defusion’
of instincts due to the withdrawal of the libidinal components. The
achievements of the function of judgement only become feasible, how-
ever, after the creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thought
with a first degree of independence from the results of repression and
at the same time from the sway of the pleasure-principle.

³ [Cf. ‘Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Function-
ing’ (1911), Collected Papers, Vol. IV, 1925, p. 16.]

371

This view of negation harmonizes very well with the fact that in
analysis we never discover a ‘No’ in the unconscious, and that a
recognition of the unconscious on the part of the ego is expressed in a
negative formula. There is no stronger evidence that we have been
successful in uncovering the unconscious than when the patient reacts
with the words: ‘I didn’t think that’ or ‘I never thought of that’.