Condemning judgment is one of the possible vicissitudes of a repressed instinctual impulse. It is in fact the most highly elaborated one, since it involves neither flight nor a refusal to give access to the intruding element, but, on the contrary, since it is a judgment, acknowledging the existence of the impulse that will later be condemned.

Sigmund Freud raised the issue of condemning judgments in "Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis" (1910a [1909], p. 53) in the context of a crucial question: If psychoanalysis makes possible the lifting of repression, what happens to the instincts that are liberated in the process? Freud's response is nuanced and consists in emphasizing that other, more conventional instinctual impulses may also have been liberated and can oppose the former. But above all, repression is posited as the result of the time lag between the capacities of the immature ego and its instincts. The work of analysis, in...