Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Inhibition

Sigmund Freud defined inhibition as "the expression of a restriction of an ego-function. A restriction of this kind can itself have very different causes." This definition appears in the opening pages of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d [1925]).

Analogizing from a medical definition of the concept ("restriction of an organ function") does not perfectly express the psychopathological specificity of the notion of inhibition. Thus when Freud states that the "ego-function of an organ is impaired if its erotogenicity—its sexual significance—is increased," (1926d [1925]) this mechanism, which is borrowed from the clinical psychoanalysis of hysteria, provides no psycho-pathological differentiation between the inhibition and the symptom.

In the same volume he also underlines the links between inhibition and the concept of anxiety: "Some inhibitions obviously represent a relinquishment of a function because its exercise would produce anxiety." In this way Freud tries to delineate the concept by comparing it with and distinguishing it from other notions that have been described by analytic theory, as indicated fairly clearly in the title of the work. Apart from the fact that they enable us to isolate a pure form of inhibition—"The libido may simply be turned away"—these efforts lead Freud to distinguish two types of inhibition "as a measure of precaution or brought about as a result of an impoverishment of energy." The study of these different mechanisms enables him to define the modalities of the opposition between inhibition and symptoms: unlike inhibition, "the symptom cannot any longer be described as a process that takes place within, or acts upon, the ego."

This opposition makes it possible to define inhibition as a simple relinquishment at the level of the ego, where the symptom accomplishes a veritable compromise between the ego and the instinctual demands of the id. Freud offers an illustration of this in relation to the horse phobia in the case of Little Hans. In this case, "the inability to go out into the streets was an inhibition, a restriction which his ego had imposed on itself so as not to arouse the anxiety-symptom." The phobic symptom cannot be described as such except when there has been "the replacement of his father by a horse. It is this displacement, then, which has a claim to be called a symptom."

Emphasizing the fundamentally imaginary status of inhibition, Jacques Lacan reviewed his study in the seminar devoted to anxiety by opposing it to the notion of an act. The latter appears as a response of the subject forced to adopt a position in relation to its splitting. Unlike inhibition, the act "après-coup" inaugurates a new transformed subject: "Only action engenders certitude in the subject." By means of this opposition, inhibition appears as an attempt on the part of the subject to defer an option, a choice to be made in relation to its desire. Like Freud's dissatisfied tone in relation to the theories developed in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Lacan's proposed extensions confirm the difficulties of apprehending the concept of inhibition but also its heuristic value.

NICOLAS DISSEZ

See also: Action-(re)presentation; Act, passage to the Allergy; Civilization and Its Discontents; Drive/instinct; Facilitation; Friendship; Idealization; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety; Infantile sexual curiosity; Jokes; Knowledge or research, instinct for; Oedipus complex, early; Ontogenesis; Orgasm; Pleasure in thinking; Prepsychosis; Sexual theories of children; Smell, sense of; Thought.