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13 The Genesis of the Surface II: Negation and Disjunction for freud, negation is both a surface effect and what generates this surface . It is a correlate of the consciousness and intellect that make up the psyche’s surface, but it is mapped more or less accurately onto the body’s physical surface and the negative difference between inside and outside. Negation is thus a feature of reality and of the psyche’s reality principle. No negation resides in the unconscious, where contraries condense into one another as though they were conformities (Freud 1966, 178), nor any linear time, with its spatialized difference between past, present, and future, nor fear of death, which is an abstract concept belonging to the mind’s higher strata (Freud 1961a, 57–58). These are all products of the extension and withdrawal of cathectic energies to and from external objects (Freud 1961c, 231; 1995, 669) and of external frustrations and threats that, when they do not create certain pathologies where it collapses, establish the boundary line between the conscious portion of the ego and the outer world (Freud 1961a, 58–59; 1994, 2–4). Psychic conflicts are played out only on this boundary line, which provides them with sense and anchors them in real rather than phantasmatic origins. While the surface establishes a resonance between psychical and physical domains, the latter is privileged for the sake of Freud’s aspiration to scientific rigor. The meaning of psychical conflict can be adequately expressed . . . by saying that for an external frustration to become pathogenic an internal frustration must be added to it. In that case, of course, the external and internal frustration relate to different paths and objects . The external frustration removes one possibility of satisfaction and the internal frustration seeks to exclude another possibility, about which the conflict then breaks out. I prefer this way of repre- 131 The Genesis of the Surface II senting the matter because it has a secret content. For it hints at the probability that the internal impediments arose from real external obstacles during the prehistoric periods of human development. (1966, 350) Negation effects a compromise with repressed instincts and ideas, which can enter consciousness only in the form of denials, although neither these denials nor the patient’s eventual acceptance of the repressed material removes the processes of repression (Freud 1961b, 235–36). But negation is also an expression of death instincts turned outward, as either a general wish to negate found in certain psychoses or a symbol of negation that grants thinking its independence from both the pleasure principle and repression (239). In thinking, negation assumes two roles corresponding to the two functions of judgment: assigning attributes to subjects and deciding the real existence of things. In assigning attributes, affirmation and negation correspond to oral processes of introjection and projection: ‘‘Expressed in the language of the oldest—the oral—instinctual impulses, the judgment is: ‘I should like to eat this,’ or ‘I should like to spit it out’; . . . the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical’’ (237). Judgment of existence, linked to the later reality-ego (237–38), similarly involves the inside/outside division: ‘‘What is unreal, merely a presentation and subjective, is only internal ; what is real is also there outside’’ (237). The ego and its boundaries, however, are established and consolidated by two forms of real negation: the withdrawal of objects and external threats. Through the temporary loss and return of sources of excitation, ‘‘an object first presents itself to the ego as something existing outside,’’ while ‘‘a further stimulus to the growth and formation of the ego, so that it becomes something more than a bundle of sensations . . . is afforded by the frequent, unavoidable and manifold pains and unpleasant sensations which the pleasure-principle . . . bids it abolish or avoid’’ (Freud 1994, 3); through the castration complex, which functions as a threat that dissolves the boy’s Oedipus complex and a lack that initiates the girl’s penis envy, the identities of the sexes are defined and the higher portions of the psyche—the ego-ideal and the superego—are secured (Freud 1961d; 1965, 112–35). Freud’s different theorizations of neurotic anxiety are also linked to these two forms of real negation, the early theory attributing it to...

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