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Written by Freud after "A Note upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad"' (1925a), this article was first published in the review Imago.

Seen in its clinical context, negation dramatizes a situation of interpretative conflict. The patient first produces the interpretation, which he imputes to the psychoanalyst, claiming that it is false. Negation is thus related to a dialogical situation: "Now you'll think I mean . . . but really I've no such intention." (1925h, p. 235).

Returning to a distinction he had established in the analysis of the "Rat Man" ("Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis," 1909) between the pure "ideational content" ("Notes," p. 176) and the positive or negative judgment in which it is incorporated, Freud says that the contribution of the unconscious to knowledge consists in the access it grants us to the repressed content. This knowledge of the repressed content does not require a lifting of repression. The dichotomy is thus displaced, and the pair of opposites affirmation/negation is eclipsed by the opposition between the affective and the intellectual. "[I]ntellectual acceptance of the repressed" (1925h, p. 236) leaves the process of repression intact, since this latter consists in a process of separation. But isn't the phrase "intellectual acceptance" a contradiction in terms? The compromise in which negation consists thus seems to make it possible, if not to lift the repression, at least to uncover the repressed content.

Over and above registering the content, the function of judgment is, Freud states, to produce "decisions" (Entscheidungen). Taking up the philosophical distinction between judgments of attribution and judgments of existence, Freud describes two levels of psychic working-through. The first level consists in attributing a good or bad quality to something, and is linked to the instinctual impulses that drive the original pleasure-ego, which "wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad" (p. 237). The decision of judgment thus plays the decisive role in operations determined by instinctual factors, swallowing and spitting—operations that establish the first distinction between inside and outside. Freud's insistence here on the instinctual dimension of negation met with a certain reservation on the part of Jean Hyppolite: "There is not yet any judgment in this moment of emergence; there is the first myth of inside and outside." So we might think in terms of a first evaluation that, when it is positive, leads the object to disappear within an enriched pleasure-ego, rather than an operation of judgment bearing on an external object.

In order for the second level of judgment to intervene and decide whether the object actually exists or not, a certain mediation is necessary—that of representation, attesting to the reality of the represented. The definition of the judgment of existence thus ties in with the notion of reality-testing and rests on the occurrence of a cut that is linked with the loss of the primal objects. However, the judgment of existence cannot be defined as a mere process of thought, because it is related to a motor process that "puts an end to the postponement due to thought . . . and leads over from thinking to acting" (p. 238).

In counter-distinction to the theme put forward in "Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays" (1939 [1934-38]), with its emphasis on the cut between the sensory and the intellectual domains, the study of negation invites us to see the processes at work in sense-perception as lying at the very heart of intellectual operations: tactile exploration (tasten) and the fact of tasting (verkosten) small perceptual samples, which endows the processes of thought with a two-phase temporality, made up of advances and retreats. Should this participation of two aims be understood in terms of rhythm, or related to the opposition between Eros, which upholds affirmation, and Thanatos, which upholds negation?

The last section of Freud's text returns to the topographical question: Negation, unknown at the level of the unconscious, needs to be situated on a secondary level, and we can gain access to it only by way of the symbol. The study of the interrelation of oral instinctual motions and the establishment of negative and affirmative behavior has been further investigated in the works of René Spitz.

MONIQUE SCHNEIDER

See also: Ego; Purified-pleasure-ego; Negation; Negative, work of; Thought; Working-through.