FREUD'S

MODELS OF THE MIND

 Monograph Series of
The Psychoanalysis Unit of University College London
and
The Anna Freud Centre

Series Editors
Joseph Sandler & Peter Fonagy
PSYCHOANALYTIC MONOGRAPHS

No. 1

FREUD'S
MODELS OF THE MIND
An Introduction

Joseph Sandler
Alex Holder
Christopher Dare
Anna Ursula Dreher

Foreword by
Robert S. Wallerstein

London
KARNAC BOOKS
First published in 1997 by
H. Karnac (Books) Ltd.
Karnac Books Ltd.
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Reprinted 2005

Copyright 8 1997 Joseph Sandler and Peter Fonagy

Foreword Copyright O Robert S Wallerstein

The rights of Christopher Dare, Anna Ursula Dreher, Alex Holder, and Joseph
Sandler to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance
with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Sandler, Joseph
Freud's Models of the Mind
1. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939
I. Title 11. Dreher, Anna Ursula
150.1'952

ISBN: 978 1 85575

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 THE PSYCHOANALYSIS UNIT AT UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE L O N D O N was founded by JosephSandler in
1984, when he was appointed to the Freud Memorial
Chair of Psychoanalysis in the University of London
(which replaced the annual Freud Memorial Visiting
Professorship at UCL). The Unit is based in the Psychol-
ogy Department, arguably the strongest, and certainly the broadest,
department of psychology in the United Kingdom. The Unit quickly
became a thriving centre for academic psychoanalysis and established
a busy doctoral programme in psychoanalytic research. A weekly
programme of lectures was organized, and several highly successful
psychoanalytic conferences have been held each year. Through the
Unit psychoanalysis began to occupy a central place in the intellectual
life of University College London.
The Unit initiated close collaboration with the International Psycho-
analytical Association. Major scientific meetings of the Association were
held in conjunction with the Unit, including the annual IPA Conference
in Psychoanalytic Research and an IPA Conference on Psychoanalysis
and Literature. In addition to fostering these important links between
international psychoanalysis and the British university, the Unit
maintains close ties with the British Psycho-Analytical Society. It
collaborates regularly with the major theoretical groups within the
Society in offering an academic platform for presenting and discussing
their views.
In 1992 Peter Fonagy succeeded Joseph Sandler in the Freud
Chair, with Professor Sandler remainingas a Co-director of the Unit. The
Unit's focus on post-graduate education has continued, with now over a
dozen Ph.D. students at any one time. In collaboration with tlie British
Psycho-Analytical Society, the Unit has created a Mastcr oi Science
degree in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies (non-clinical). Over the
years, the strength of the link between the Unit and other psychoanalytic
organizations has increased, with academic members of the staff
of The Anna Freud Centre becoming affiliated to the University via
the Psychoanalysis Unit. The Unit's original links to the Psychology
Department have been maintained and developed, with Professor
Fonagy assuming the headship of the Sub-Department of Clinical Health
Psychology on its inception in 1994. The international influence of the
Unit continues to increase, and in 1995 it organized and hosted the first
research training programme for psychoanalysts sponsored by the
International Psycho-AnalyticalAssociation. As part of this development,
leading psychoanalytic researchers became visiting professors of the
Unit; these have included Professors Robert Emde, Horst Kachele, Wilma
Bucci, Otto Kernberg, and Peter Hobson.
The mission of the Unit remains the integration of psychoanalytic
ideas with academic pursuits across a range of disciplines-literature,
medicine, the social sciences, the arts. The Unit frequently consults with
leading academics from those disciplines who seek advice on psycho-
analytic aspects of their work. It has become a national and international
centre for psychoanalytic research and scholarship.

THE ANNA FREUD CENTRE was founded by Anna

Freud in 1940 as the Hampstead War Nurseries, which
provided a home for children who had lost their
own homes or were separated from their parents in
some other way in the Blitz. After the war, Anna Freud
responded to the urgent demand for greater expertise in
child mental health and the childhood disorders by founding The
Hampstead Child Therapy Course and the Clinic, which, after Anna
Freud's death, was renamed in 1984 as The Anna Freud Centre.
Since its inception, The Hampstead Child Therapy Course has
provided high-level, intensive training in all aspects of child psycho-
analysis and psychotherapy. Training at the Centre has received formal
accreditation from the International Association for Child Psycho-
analysis, and many of the child psychoanalysts and psychotherapists
trained at the Centre are currently practicing in the United Kingdom and
elsewhere.
 After the untimely death in 1992 of the Director, George Moran, Rose
Edgcumbe functioned as Acting Director until 1993, when Anne-Marie
Sandler was appointed to the Directorship. After her retirement in 1996,
Julia Fabricius was appointed to the post. In addition to combining
therapy, training, and research, the Centre provides a psychiatric
assessment and advisory service for children and young adults, long-
term therapy and young adults' consultation and preventive services,
and an internationally recognized and highly esteemed programme
of research. In an important collaboration with University College
London, the Centre offers a Master of Science degree in Psychoanalytic
Developmental Psychology. This unique course reflects the extension
and accreditation of the Centre's well-established teaching programme.
CONTENTS

PREFACE

FOREWORD by Robert S. Wallerstein

Introduction

I
FOUNDATIONS

1 The development of Freud's theory

2 Basic assumptions

I1
FIRST PHASE:
THE AFFECT-TRAUMA FRAME OF REFERENCE
3 The affect-trauma model 41

I11
SECOND PHASE:
THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

4 The organization of the mental apparatus 57

5 The system Unconscious 72

6 The system Preconscious 82

X CONTENTS

7 The system Conscious

8 Transference
9 Dream processes

IV
FURTHER ASPECTS

10 Narcissism and object-love 141

11 Limitations and transition to the structural model 153

v
THIRD PHASE:
THE STRUCTURAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

12 Characteristics 165
13 The three agencies 172

A final word 185

REFERENCES

INDEX
PREFACE

T
his book has been long in the making. It began as a series of
lectures given at the Institute of Psychiatry, University
of London (Maudsley Hospital), on Freud's theories by
one of us (J.S.) and was substantially revised and elaborated into
papers by Joseph Sandler, Alex Holder, and Christopher Dare. The
project was carried out in collaboration with the Index Project of
the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic, London (now The Anna
Freud Centre) and was supported by a research grant from The
Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis, Beverly Hills, Cali-
fornia.
Eleven papers were published in the British Journal of Medical
Psychology during the period from 1970 to 1978. Unfortunately,
the project came to a halt because the three authors became pre-
occupied with what seemed at the time to be more important
tasks. A final, twelfth, paper was published in 1982 after a long
latent period.' It became clear that the series had, regretfully, come
to an end.
The published papers proved extremely popular with teachers
of psychoanalytic theory and their students, particularly in Britain,
Israel, and the United States, and photocopies were widely circu-
lated. They have been used extensively in teaching at the Anna
Freud Centre and the Psychoanalysis Unit of University College
London. The success of the original series of papers, in spite of it
not having been completed, stimulated the wish to see the project
finished and published as a book. Accordingly, with the agree-

'
Sandler, Dare, & Holder, 1972a, 1972b, 1972c, 1974,1978,1982; Sandler,
Holder, &Dare,1972,1973a, 1973b, 1973c, 1975,1976.
xii PREFACE

ment of Christopher Dare and Alex Holder, a careful further revi-

sion and expansion of the published papers was carried out (by
A.U.D. and J.S.). The material necessary for the completion of the
work was added, together with notes and comments referring to
later developments in psychoanalysis. This required much time
and effort, and as a consequence the book, unlike the papers, now
has four authors. It was supported in part by a grant to one of us
(A.U.D.) by the Edith Ludowyk-Gyomroi Trust.
Acknowledgments are due to Alex Holder and Mary Target
for their careful reading of the manuscript and suggestions for its
improvement. Anne-Marie Sandler and Joachim Wutke deserve
our grateful thanks for their help and encouragement. Rosine
Perelberg read the manuscript and made useful suggestionsbased
on her experience as a teacher of Freud's frames of reference.
Thanks are also due to the many colleagues and others who used
the basic material of this book for teaching, and who suggested
improvements. Araminta Whitley, Cesare Sacerdoti, and Klara
and Eric King all contributed to the passage of the manuscript
into print. Finally, we owe a debt to those students who asked
penetrating questions, some of which we have attempted to
answer. Last, but not least, we are grateful to Paula Barkay for
her exceptional organizational and secretarial help.
Joseph Sandler and Anna Ursula Dreher,
London and Frankfurt,
February 1997

Note: In nonspecific case accounts we have used the feminiue pronoun

for analysts and the masculine pronoun for patients nl~dother persons in
general.
FOREWORD

Robert S. Wallersfein

T
he psychoanalysis created over a lifetime of prodigious
labour by its founding genius, Sigmund Freud, was sub-
sequently further developed by a host of gifted (and
charismatic) followers. Unfortunately it has never achieved the
coherent and seamless unitary-and unifying-theoretical struc-
ture that Freud and his close colleagues in the original secret
committee of the seven ring holders envisaged and aspired to. In
fact, David Rapaport, the great systematizer of the epoch of
hegemonic sway (at least in America) of ego psychology, declared
psychoanalysis to be rather an assortment of theories. He saw it as
a theory of mind and normal mental functioning, a theory of
mental development, a theory of psychopathology, and, among
other things, a theory of therapy. This last was, however, stated by
Rapaport to be only a collection of "rules of thumb", all loosely
articulated with one another. There was overlapping, of course, but
there were cleavage lines and awkward fits: and all of this was
usually glossed over by what Joseph Sandler has felicitously called
the "elasticity" of our concepts. As a consequence, words and con-
ceptions could be employed with altered meanings as they were
deployed as bridges between one psychoanalytic conceptual
framework and another.
Of course, this has never made for tidy theory formation
and growth, and the inherent theoretical slippage and potential
confusion have only deepened as time has passed since Freud's
era. In Freud's lifetime there was at least the effort to maintain a
unified theoretical structure for psychoanalysis, but now we
have a multiplication of theoretical perspectives, or "movements",
within the house of worldwide organized psychoanalysis. We have
the ego psychological-and now the post-ego psychological-the
xiv FOREWORD

Kleinian (and the Bionian), the multiply parented object-relational

(Fairbairn,Guntrip, Winnicott, Balint, Bowlby, et al.), the Lacanian,
the Kohutian self-psychological, and all the varieties of the inter-
personal. There are also the intersubjective and the constructivist
perspectives, as well as all the varying regional and national con-
ventions and linguistic preferences (francophone vis-8-vis anglo-
phone psychoanalysis,for example).Added to this is, of course, the
whole spectrum of differing conceptions of the very nature of our
psychoanalytic discipline. These range from the natural science
model propounded so vigorously by Freud, through the declared
differing social and/or behavioural science model (in the extreme,
the model of psychoanalysis as "our peculiar science"), all the way
to the espousal of psychoanalysis as no natural science at all but,
rather, a hermeneutical discipline like history or literary criticism,
or the Biblical interpretation from which the conception of herme-
neutics derived in the first instance.
In the current state of our theoretical affairs, and almost
uniquely among scholarly disciplines, at least those claiming the
status of some sort of science, progressive developments in psycho-
analysis can only be fully comprehended in the light of a close
knowledge of their psychoanalytic conceptual forebears; that is,
of the past in its formative (and deformative) shaping role in the
present. This is, incidentally, a familiar enough psychoanalytic
conception. Given this state of affairs, there is a surprising paucity
of efforts to portray the scope and structure of Freud's original
psychoanalytic intellectual edifice as it evolved in his work and
thought and as he altered it very significantly, and often very
radically, with his accumulating clinical (and personal) experi-
ences and the theoretical revisions to which they propelled him
over his lifetime. All this provided a vital conceptual base for
understanding the myriad post-Freudian psychoanalytic develop-
ments, and direct or convoluted evolution out of Freud's original
corpus.
Freud himself, even in his posthumous An Outline of Psycho-
analysis, never attempted a comprehensive and methodical over-
view of his own work and thought as it had developed and
altered over his lifetime. He did not systematically reconceptualize
and recontextualize earlier positions in the light of later concep-
tual revisions; and this necessary labour has also been avoided by
 FOREWORD XV

almost all major theoretical contributors after Freud. This has per-
haps been because of the extreme and very rigorous intellectual
effort that would be required in order to match the daunting com-
plexity of the task. And yet, as Sandler and his co-authors remind
us in their "Final Word", on the very last page of this text, a
detailed and systematic exegesis of Freud's work and thought as he
elaborated and emended it over his lifetime is indeed, as they say,
a necessary "basis for understanding and working with later psy-
choanalytic formulations. . . . For example, current views on object
relations and narcissistic pathology cannot be fully appreciated
without a knowledge of Freud's views on such basic concepts as
narcissism and transference."
It is indeed this task that Sandler and his original co-authors,
added to so ably by the participation now of Anna Ursula Dreher,
have so successfully accomplished in this book. As the authors
indicate in their Preface, the book began as a series of lectures
given many years ago to students in the mental health professions
at the Maudsley Hospital (The Institute of Psychiatry of the Uni-
versity of London) and then, elaborated into a sequence of papers
by the first three authors, published as a series in the early 1970s in
the British Journal of Medical Psychology. However successful this
was as a project, the authors nonetheless felt it to be incomplete,
and now, two decades later, Sandler and Dreher have undertaken
to revise and expand, and essentially to complete, the whole
project in book form. Though updated with appropriate referential
linkages to subsequent developments in psychoanalysis, the au-
thors have held firm to their original intent to present the structure
of Freud's own work and thought as systematically as possible,
given all the twists and even contradictions in Freud's develop-
mental progression. This can serve as a conceptual springboard for
both neophyte and seasoned analyst better to navigate our bur-
geoning literature. At the same time they can keep in mind the
transformed derivations from and elaborations upon Freud, as
well as the clear departures from-and even repudiations of-
other tenets of his overall body of work.
They set their book within the seemingly very obvious and
familiar delineation of three major "frames of reference" by which
Freud's work can be marked. These are: (1)the period of the seduc-
tion (external trauma) causation theory of neurosis, which they call
xvi FOREWORD

"the affect-trauma frame of reference" (from the beginning in the

mid-1880s until 1897); (2) the period of emphasis upon the vicissi-
tudes of the instinctual drives and the defences against them (the
period of so-called drive psychology), which they call "the topo-
graphical frame of reference" (the quarter-century from 1897 to
1923); and (3) the period of emphasis upon the conflicts and com-
promises among the psychic agencies of the tripartite mind (the
period of of dominance of so-called ego psychology), which they
call "the structural frame of reference" (lasting from 1923 to well
after Freud's death in 1939). The careful reading that this book so
fully warrank will reveal all of the elegance and daring of Freud's
theorizing, along with the careful logic of sequential development
and experientially induced revision--even fundamental revision.
It will show as well all the complexity of the developing lines of
thought that make Freud's lifetime work an almost unparalleled
human achievement. What Freud created almost single-handedly
was an entire therapeutic discipline and the science of the mind in
which it is embedded.
As I have stated elsewhere (1988): "Perhaps more than any
other branch of human knowledge psychoanalysis has been
uniquely the singular product of the creative genius of one man,
Sigmund Freud. His lifetime of productive work was extraordi-
narily prodigious and if the totality of psychoanalysis consisted
of nothing more than the corpus of Freud's work, the Gesammelte
Werke, I think we could readily agree that all the fundamental
principles and the essential fabric of a fully operating scientific and
professional activity would be available to us as students and prac-
titioners." Though psychoanalysis today, building from and upon
Freud's legacy, has extended very far beyond his original reach, I
am convinced that the reader of this book by Sandler and his
colleagues will appreciate it and profit from it, both as a master-
fully synthesized exposition of just what Freud's intellectual
accomplishmentwas, and as a very congenial and comprehensive
knowledge base against which to measure all the different devel-
opments in psychoanalysis since.
 FREUD'S
MODELS OF THE MIND
Introduction

P
sychoanalytic theory is difficult to teach. It aspires to be not
only a general theory of normal and pathological mental
functioning, but also a theory of therapy.' In Freud's words,

Psycho-Analysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investi-

gation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in
any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation)
for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3)of a collection of
psychological information obtained along those lines, which is
gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline.
[1923a (1922), p. 2351
additional difficulty is posed by the fact that psychoanalysis
has developed in a somewhat uneven fashion over more than a

Freud called his overall theory of the mind his "metapsychology" (1900a,
1901b, 1915e)-that is, something beyond psychology--but the term may be
misleading, because Freud wanted to contrast his psychology (whichinvolved
unconscious processes) with the psychology of consciousness current a t that
time. In view of the developments that have taken place in psychology since
then, it is not inappropriate to speak now of psychoanalytic psychology.
2 INTRODUCTION

century. As the distinguished psychoanalyst Ernst Kris remarked,

when the "new scientific discipline" was only a few decades old:
Current psychoanalytic terminology is, by and large, that used
by Freud. Freud's language bears the imprint of the physiol-
ogy, neurology, psychiatry, and the classical education of
his age. It is colored by its use in the therapeutic procedure,
hence the richness of metaphors. . . . Throughout fifty years,
psychoanalytic hypotheses have frequently been revised and
reformulated. Rarely, however, have all previous findings
been integrated with new insight. . . . At present, hypotheses
in psychoanalysis are formulated in various terminologies
according to the various stages of the development of psycho-
analysis in which they were suggested. [1947, p. 251
Indeed, since these words were written, the difficulties referred to
have become even greater. In addition, the problem of understand-
ing psychoanalytic theory may at times be intensified because of
deficiencies of presentation, for not every accomplished psycho-
analytic clinician is a good exponent of theory, and some may be
excessively dogmatic, while others are too inhibited by the com-
plexities and ambiguities of the subject. Teachers of psychoanalysis
have often attributed the difficulties that exist in comprehending
psychoanalytic theory entirely to the emotionally based resistance
of the student (whether he be a student in a psychoanalytic train-
ing course or a psychiatrist, psychologist, or caseworker). Such
resistances were especially common in the early days of psycho-
analysis, when, for example, the idea of childhood sexuality and
its persisting influence on mental functioning was particularly
unacceptable. There can be little doubt that the emphasis placed
by psychoanalysts on such things as unconscious incestuous,
sadistic, "perverse" impulses and the like may evoke responses of
antagonism and rejection of psychoanalysis as a whole. Certain
unfortunate consequences follow if the view that difficulties in
understanding psychoanalytic ideas are due to resistances is main-
tained. Foremost among these consequences is a tendency for some
psychoanalysts to reject legitimate and reasonable critical evalua-
tion of psychoanalytic ideas as being intrinsically irrational and
tendentious. Such psychoanalysts throw the baby out with the
bath water, so to speak. While there is no doubt that emotional
resistances to the acceptance of psychoanalysis occur, they form
 INTRODUCTION 3

only a part of those difficulties that arise as obstacles to communi-

cation. There are other difficulties, equally linked with psychoana-
lytic theories, that are not predominantly emotional in origin,
but are essentially intellectual problems relating to the complex
structure and organization of psychoanalytic concepts. The more
we know of the way in which psychoanalytic theory is organized
within itself and how it has developed, the more readily will we
be able to distinguish between the two areas of difficulty. It is not
often realized that certain problems are inherent in psychoanalytic
theory because of the very nature of its development (quite apart
from its subject matter). Even within Freud's own writings we can
observe that theoretical developments did not take place along
a single broad front, and earlier formulations were not always
integrated into those made later. Thus the theory of dreams is still
most explicitly formulated in terms of the so-called topographical
model (with its division into the Unconscious, the Preconscious,
and Conscious systems, abbreviated by Freud to Ucs., Pcs., and Cs.),
even though for many purposes, as will be seen later, the topo-
graphical model has been superseded by the structural one (with
its three major agencies, id, ego, and superego). Moreover, the same
term was used by Freud to mean different things at different times,
and this has persisted in subsequent psychoanalytic writings.
In the course of studying a number of clinical psychoanalytic
concepts (Sandler, Dare, & Holder, 1992) it became clear that the
understanding of all the concepts investigated (e.g. transference,
resistance, and acting out) was bedeviled by the fact that the same
term was often used with different meanings at different times
in the developing literature of psychoanalysis. As a consequence, a
psychoanalytic term may currently be given a variety of meanings
(some of them even contradictory) derived from different epochs.
The same is true of the more abstract theoretical concepts and
the words used to encompass them. The changes in meaning of
the term "unconscious" are an important example of this. Among
the many meanings covered by this term are (1) a "quality" of
experience and (2) a mental "system", the "dynamic" Unconscious.
Attempts to provide an ex cathedra and comparatively arbitrary
set of definitions fail to solve the problem, for such definitions are
relatively static, do not integrate perfectly with one another, and
lead to an omission of important aspects of psychoanalytic think-
4 INTRODUCTION

ing. In our view what should be aimed for is an understanding of

psychoanalytic concepts and theories in their appropriate histori-
cal contexts, and the best place to start is with an examination of
Freud's own theoretical models.
In general, attempts to deal with the problem of teaching
Freud's concepts have taken different directions. One attempt is,
for example, to present Freud's ideas as if they could be encom-
passed within a single unified framework. The problem with this is
that teachers adopting such an approach d o not do justice to the
complexity of Freud's theories. Another approach is that in which
the student of psychoanalysis is expected to learn by going through
Freud's works in chronological order, retracing the path of devel-
opment of his concepts. While this procedure may appeal to some,
to many it is a source of irritation and confusion, for the student
does not pursue his or her studies in vacuo. The student may con-
currently be engaged in clinical practice and be grappling with
contemporary ways of thinking in psychoanalysis. Small wonder
that a number are attracted to "new" and apparently all-encom-
passing theoretical systems, which are relatively easy to grasp.
Others are tempted to reject all psychoanalytic theories or to pro-
nounce them irrelevant to their practical work. The net result is
often that students of psychoanalysis do not acquire a basic knowl-
edge of Freud's ideas, and they rationalize this by taking the view
that Freud is "out of date". We take the view that it is necessary to
have an overall grasp of Freud's concepts in order to understand
modern developments in psychoanalysis; at the same time, we are
fully aware of the difficulties in the path of acquiring a knowledge
of Freud's views.
The ambiguities we have mentioned, the coexistence of dif-
ferent theoretical models, and even the contradictions within
psychoanalytic theory, are intrinsic to and an inevitable aspect ofpsy-
choanalysis as a developing and changing body of knowledge. Freud
expressed this in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes":
We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be
built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual
fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such
definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists
rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to
group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of de-
 INTRODUCTION 5
scription it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract
ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere
or other but certainly not from the new observations alone.
Such ideas-which will later become the basic concepts of the
science-are still more indispensable as the material is further
worked over. They must at first necessarily possess some de-
gree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear
delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this
condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning
by making repeated references to the material of observation
from which they appear to have been derived, but upon
which, in fact, they have been imposed. Thus, strictly speak-
ing, they are in the nature of conventions-although every-
thing depends on their not being arbitrarily chosen but
determined by their having significant relations to the empiri-
cal material, relations that we seem to sense before we can
clearly recognize and demonstrate them. It is only after more
thorough investigation of the field of observation that we are
able to formulate its basic scientific concepts with increased
precision, and progressively so to modify them that they
become serviceable and consistent over a wide area. Then,
indeed, the time may have come to confine them in definitions.
The advance of knowledge, however, does not tolerate any
rigidity even in definitions. Physics furnishes an excellent
illustration of the way in which even "basic concepts" that
have been established in the form of definitions are constantly
being altered in their content. [1915c, p. 1171
It thus becomes essential for those who wish to master the
subject, even at a relatively elementary level, to tolerate certain
ambiguities involved in the theory, rather than to try to eliminate
them, for ambiguity need not constitute confusion? Nevertheless,
attempts to clar* concepts will always be necessary.

'Even those who disdain explicit and formal theorizing develop, of neces-
sity, their own personal (and to some extent idiosyncratic) inner sets of
theories. They may be unaware of the existence of such theories or frames of
reference, or be unable to verbalize them. They may also be unaware of contra-
dictions between them, and of their shifts from one to another as appropriate.
Even the "purest" clinician has her theories about her patients (Sandler, 1983;
Sandler & Dreher, 1996).
6 INTRODUCTION

Formal training in psychoanalysis is complicated by the fact

that it has a dual aim-to train people to be scholars and to be
clinicians. While we believe thzt a thorough theoretical back-
ground is vital for every psychoanalyst, we do not believe that it is
essential for every psychoanalytic practitioner to be burdened with
a mammoth history of psychoanalysis in all its minute detail. Nor
do we believe that a detailed tracing of the vicissitudes of Freud's
theory is appropriate for the student in his early years. This can be
illustrated by an example of the sort of detailed examination of
psychoanalytic chronology-the work of a distinguished psycho-
analytic scholar-with which the student may be confronted.
In his attempt to distinguish Cs. and Pcs., Freud finally, though
only momentarily, exalted Cs. to a position similar to that of
the ego in present-day theory, for he ascribed reality testing
and the control of motility to it, and this is not one of those
instances in which he used Cs. interchangeably for Pcs., but on
the contrary an explicit attempt to distinguish between the two
systems. This distinction appeared in "A Metapsychological
Supplement to the Theory of Dreams", the paper following
"The Unconscious." But the attribution of this role to the Cs.
was short-lived, for a moment later Freud attributed both real-
ity testing and the censorship to the ego-an undefined term at
this point4learly foreshadowing the explicit formulation of
The Ego and the Id. And then Freud described Cs. as an "organ"
of the ego. In this last formulation Cs. becomes a sense organ of
the ego (as it was of the Pcs. in the original topographic theory
of 1900) instead of a system which was itself in effect the
present-day ego. [Gill, 1963, pp. 31-32]
This formulation by a lucid psychoanalytic commentatorj
is difficult to grasp unless one has had an intensive previous
acquaintance with psychoanalytic theory. Such examples, which
share the characteristic of being incomprehensible to all but the
most sophisticated theoreticians, can be multiplied a thousandfold.
It is our view that the presentation of material at this level is quite
inappropriate to the initial teaching of psychoanalysis. It is better

'Gill later expressed his own dissatisfaction with this sort of meta-
psychology (personal communication to J.S.)
 INTRODUCTION 7
to have a simplified account presented initially, even though
the special difficulties inherent in the communication of psycho-
analytic theory make it necessary to preserve the broad lines of
historical change. In line with this, the approach we are taking
is essentially a historical rather than a chronological one, for a
historical approach involves schematization and the extraction of
essentials, even though this may do injustice to the complexity and
detailed development of the subject.
In the fields of general psychology and in medicine, as in
other subjects, the student is presented with a relatively simplified
"rounded-out" view during the first part of his training. Theoret-
ical contradictions are, for the most part, left until later. What
he is first taught acts as frames of reference, tools with which he
can assess his experience. Similarly, we propose to present a his-
torically ordered sequence of three Freudian frames of reference: the
affect-trauma, the topographical, and the structural. By presenting
what we regard as the basic coexisting conceptual frameworks in
his writings, we hope to facilitate comprehensibility and comrnuni-
cation.
Although the frames of reference are located in relation to
phases of development in the history of psychoanalysis, they
represent present-day constructions on our part. They are schematic
and eliminate, in the interest of simplification, some of the incon-
sistencies and variations found in the original writings. We have
paid particular attention to what we have called the topographical
frame of reference because it was the basis for the development of
most subsequent psychoanalytic ideas and because of its profound
clinical relevance. It is by now well known that the construction of
history is never an exact reflection of "what really happenedw-it is
always a distortion of the past, reflecting the particular interest of
the individual historian. This is always true, of course, for the
writing of a history of ideas. While the historian may not be aware
of how specific the approach adopted may be, our schematization
of Freud's theories in the form of frames of reference for teaching
purposes is wholly intentional. Our approach may horrify some
of our fundamentalist analytic colleagues, or even disturb some
serious Freud scholars, but we are persuaded that it is helpful
to provide frames of reference as "organizers", making the com-
prehension and utilization of Freud and post-Freud writings some-
8 INTRODUCTION

what easier. As a reinforcement of this aim, there is a great deal of

repetition in the chapters that follow.
These frames of reference are, of course, not independent from
one another. They show a developmental progression, and there is
considerable overlap in the ideas involved, although these may be
obscured by changes in the terminology used. The relations of the
frames of reference to one another are considered in Chapter 1and
further discussed throughout.
 PART I

Foundations
CHAPTER ONE

The development
of Freud's theory

T
he history of psychoanalysis has been discussed by Freud
(1914d, 1925d [1924]), by his main biographer, Jones
(1953-57), and by a variety of authors from one point of
view or another (e.g. Ellenberger, 1970; Gay, 1988; Sulloway, 1979;
Zilboorg, 1941). There are also brief accounts of the history of
psychoanalysis written for relatively specific purposes, and many
authors have considered particular psychoanalytic concepts.
Rapaport (1959), in discussing what has come to be known as
psychoanalytic "ego psychology",' divides its development into a
number of phases, and we have found it useful to adapt his phases
to the consideration of Freud's theory.
In this chapter we present a short and selective historical ac-
count in order to provide a background to what follows. In it we
place emphasis on the interaction between observed clinical data

Ego psychology is a post-Freudian development and, for many years after

the Second World War, dominated psychoanalysis in the United States. It
placed emphasis on the role of the ego's functions and development in norm-
ality and pathology.
12 FOUNDATIONS

and treatment methods on the one hand, and the theoretical con-
structs devised to account for them on the other. Clinical experi-
ence certainly shaped the theories that Freud and his followers put
forward, and the theoretical formulations, especially in the early
years, were affected by prevailing modes of conceptualization and
notions modelled on concepts from other fields (e.g. the physical
sciences and the neurology of the time); and, of course, the socio-
cultural context offin de sie'cle Vienna played its part. In tum, each
theoretical formulation influenced the perception, evaluation, and
understanding of the clinical data, until a point was reached at
which the theoretical strain was such that a (somewhat radical)
change in theory had to be made in order to encompass the new
observations. It is quite striking how the development of psycho-
analytic theory parallels in its form the changes that have been
observed and described in other fields (see Kuhn, 1962).2

The first phase:

the affect-trauma theory

It is not possible to date the exact beginning of the first phase,

except to place it in the mid-1880s. However, we can regard it as
ending in 1897. Freud graduated in medicine in Vienna in 1881,
and he engaged in some pharmacological and comparative ana-
tomical research before qualification as a physician. He then spent
some time in Meynert's laboratory, where the neurological causes
of psychiatric disturbances were being sought. In 1885, at the age of
29, Freud obtained a travelling scholarship that enabled him to
make a crucial visit to France. There he was profoundly impressed
by Charcot, the famous psychiatrist and medical hypnotist, whose
demonstrations at the SalptStrihre he attended for a few months
in 1885-56. Charcot was showing patients who, even though they
were thought of as having neurological defects (in particular,

Clearly an effective theoretical framework acts like other cognitive and

perceptual structures,which will be made use of until they have to give way in
the face of overwhelming contradictionsor a mass of unexplained information.
The process of scientific development is very much like the way in which the
young child's concepts of the world evolve (Piaget, 1950).
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREUD'S THEORY 13

products of "degeneracy"), could be made to lose their physical

symptoms (primarily paralyses, anaesthesias, and "fits") by psy-
chological interventions, especially suggestion and hypnosis.
Freud also noted Charcot's belief that these patients (both men and
women) had decisive sexual problems in their lives. He reports
having heard Charcot say, "in this sort of case it's always a ques-
tion of the genitals-always, always, always" (Freud, 1914d,p. 14).
Freud was impressed by the parallel that such French physi-
cians as Charcot and Bemheim had drawn between the phenom-
enon of mental "dissociation" that could be induced by hypnosis
and the dissociation between a conscious and unconscious part of
the mind that appeared to occur in patients with hysterical symp-
toms. This dissociation was regarded by Charcot, and by the
French school in general (notably the psychiatrist Janet),as being
due to some fault in the nervous system, an intrinsic weakness,
so that the mind could not be held together in one piece, so to
speak.
Freud (1914d) recounted his indebtedness to the "master"
Charcot for his clinical methods and also for certain hints concern-
ing the origin of hysteria-for example, the role of traumatic
experiences as precipitating agents, as well as the possible sexual
elements in the illness. There seems little doubt that Freud was
highly selective in what he took from Charcot. Zilboorg has
pointed out that although Charcot gave evidence that he was
fully aware of deeply seated psychological currents and counter-
currents in hysteria, he seems nevertheless to have been fully
convinced that these were by-products of a physical, organic,
morbid cause combined with heredity (Zilboorg, 1941).
The impact of Freud's brief experience with Charcot can be
thought of as having two major consequences. The first was that
Freud was led towards the conviction that mental disturbances
could have psychological origins. The second was his further
development of the notion of dissociation of different aspects of
mental functioning, a concept that, in one form or another, has
remained central to psychoanalytic thinking.
On his return to Vienna Freud found himself committed to full-
time private practice as a neurologist. At that time this meant that
he was dealing with patients suffering from "nervous diseases" in
the widest sense of the term, and in his work he attempted to use
14 FOUNDATIONS

hypnosis with patients suffering from what we would now call

neurotic disorders. During this time he was impressed by the Vien-
nese physician and physiologistJosef Breuer, with whom he began
a significant collaboration in pursuit of an understanding of hyste-
ria and related disturbances. Freud began his collaboration with
Breuer in 1885, and they worked together for a number of years. A
jointly written book appeared in 1895-Breuer and Freud's famous
Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1895d).Breuer had found that a patient
(Anna O.), if allowed to talk about her symptoms in a particular
"hypnoid" state of mind, could recall events that seemed to be
related to the origin of the symptoms, with subsequent relief. The
patient herself referred to this experience as her "talking cure". In
Freud's joint work with Breuer a consideration of the greatest im-
portance was introduced in which the patient's symptoms could be
regarded as the breakthrough, in disguised form, of emotional
forces that had been dammed up and kept back by some form of
pressure. Freud emphasized, more than Breuer, the active aspect
of the process of dissociation, seeing it as a process of defence (in
contrast to the French school, which tended to regard the dissocia-
tion of the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind as an
outcome of an organic weakness, a failure of integration). Freud's
two papers on the "neuropsychoses of defence" (1894a, 1896b)
bring this point out very clearly.
In addition, Freud became convinced that the division between
conscious and unconscious parts of the mind occurred in everyone,
not only in neurotic patients. In his view symptoms arose when a
quantity of affective energy too great to be assimilated in the nor-
mal way was forced away from consciousness (repressed)and had
to find a means of indirect expression. The pent-up unconscious
forces leading to the symptom were thought of as affects or
emotions that had been aroused by real traumatic experiences.
The memories associated with these emotions were, in neurotic
patients, unacceptable to their normal standards of morality and
conduct and could therefore not be absorbed or discharged in a
normal way (see Chapter 3). As a consequence the revived but
unacceptable affects were thought of as having been "constricted"
or in some way "strangulated". Treatment was based on the idea
that such emotions could be released through bringing them and
the memories associated with them into consciousness, with sub-
sequent release of affect through abreaction (or catharsis) and
assimilation of the previously rejected mental content by the
conscious part of the mind.
Breuer had withdrawn from his collaboration with Freud after
some years, and Freud attributed this in part to the reaction of
distaste that Breuer had towards the patient's erotic transference to
him, and Freud's putting forward more and more forcibly the
importance of sexuality in the genesis of the neuroses. Freud be-
came rather disenchanted with the use of hypnosis, as not all
patients were hypnotizable and he did not regard himself as a very
good hypnotist. Moreover, the therapeutic results were not all that
might be wished for, even in those cases that could be hypnotized.
He then attempted methods using suggestion, in order to force
thoughts into the patient's consciousness. For a time Freud fol-
lowed Bernheim's procedure of laying his hand on the subject's
forehead (the so-called "pressure" technique), insisting that the
subject remember. Later he gave up these techniques of suggestion,
replacing them with the method of "free association", in which the
patient was asked to report his thoughts as they passed through his
mind.
Looking back on the development of his psychoanalytic tech-
nique, Freud commented:
My patients, I reflected, must in fact "know" all the things
which had hitherto only been made accessible to them in hyp-
nosis; and assurances and encouragement on my part, assisted
perhaps by the touch of my hand, would, I thought, have the
power of forcing the forgotten facts and connections into con-
sciousness. No doubt this seemed a more laborious process
than putting the patients into hypnosis, but it might prove
highly instructive. So I abandoned hypnotism, only retaining
my practice of requiring the patient to lie upon a sofa while I
sat behind him, seeing him, but not seen myself. [Freud, 1925d
[1924],p. 28)
The first phase of psychoanalysis can be thought of as ending in
1897, when a radical change in Freud's orientation (to be described
later) was initiated. During the first phase he had been confronted
and stimulated by problems posed by numbers of hysterical, obses-
16 FOUNDATIONS

sional, phobic, and some ambulatory psychotic patients, as well as

patients with other forms of "nervous disorder". His formulations
during this phase by now included conflict and defence, resistance,
and transference. He stressed the importance of sexual develop-
ment in the aetiology of the neuroses, and he related psycho-
pathology to the effect of psychic traumas, in particular those
related to experiences of sexual seduction in childhood. Freud also
suggested that certain disturbances were a consequence of specific
sexual frustrations and an abnormal sexual life (e.g. the practice of
coitus interruptus, sexual abstinence, masturbation). These he
called the actual neuroses? in contradistinction to the psycho-
neuroses proper--such as hysteria and obsessional neurosis.
It is necessary to comment on the concept of "actual neurosis".
In this context the word "actual" is an unfortunate translation
of the German aktual, which refers to something that is current,
topical, or happening in the present. The actual neuroses were seen
as arising from the subject's current life, his current "faulty" sexual
practices, rather than his earlier experiences. The clinical picture
was thought to have more of a somatic basis than the psycho-
neuroses and showed itself in the form of "neurasthenia", anxiety
neurosis, and hypochondriasis. The actual neuroses were not
thought to be responsive to psychoanalytic treatment.
During this time Freud's productions included a very lengthy
encyclopaedia article on childhood cerebral palsies and a manu-
script that represented a monumental attempt to produce a general
psychology in neurophysiological terms-the "Project for a Scien-
tific Psychology" (1950 [1895]).This work has thrown a great deal
of light on the development of Freud's scientific thought. The
theoretical frame of reference associated with the first phase is
discussed in Chapter 3.
At this point, it is perhaps appropriate to mention some of
the ways of thinking that Freud brought to his first psychological
theories. These were inevitably affected by the then current

In this context it is worth reflecting on the degree to which the general

taboo on open sexuality, and even on the discussion of sexual matters, influ-
enced the direction of Freud's thinking and the reactions of his contemporaries.
scientific and philosophical influences, which included the ideas
of natural causality, determinism, and adaptation inherent in
Darwin's biology and theory of natural selection. Freud was also
strongly influenced by the physiology of the Helmholtz school,
particularly by his teacher, Ernst Briicke. At the time, physiologists
were intent upon introducing the principles of contemporary phys-
ics into their subject. These principles were physico-chemical and
mechanistic, in line with the optimism of nineteenth-century scien-
tists that such principles would provide explanationsfor all natural
phenomena. By analogy, Freud formulated his psychologicalviews
in terms of energy: its conservation, displacement, and discharge.
He (with Breuer) placed great importance on the tendency for the
"mental apparatus" to keep the energies in it as low as possible
or constant. The principle of constancy called for the discharge of
quantities of energy if they became too large-as in the case of the
accumulated excitation brought about by the traumatic experi-
ences regarded as being causative factors in the production of
neurotic symptoms. In line with the dominant scientificideas of the
time, Freud systematically attempted to eliminate teleological ex-
planations in his theories; that is, he saw mental functioning as
being a form of adaptation to natural causes rather than having an
ultimate and final "purpose". The mental apparatus was conceived
of as operating according to the principles of physics, with empha-
sis on the ways in which energy that had been generated could be
discharged or expended.
Freud also brought to his thinking the general idea of an "un-
conscious mind", a concept that he was to sharpen considerably
in his theories of unconscious mental functioning. The notion of
"unconscious mind" was generally current in the rich intellectual
climate of the Vienna of Freud's student days, in the form pro-
pounded, for example, by von Hartmann, Herbart, and von
Brentano4(see Chapter 2 for an account of Freud's basic assump-
tions).

Another philosophical predisposition, ascribed to Freud's general educa-

tion (cf.Bibring, 1941),was a tendency to conceptualize in a dualistic manner--
in terms of bipolarities, antitheses, and oppositional forces-throughout his
scientific life.
18 FOUNDATIONS

The second phase:

the topographical theory

The second phase lasted from 1897 to 1923 and was a period of
rapid and substantial development in psychoanalytic theory and
practice. Although the third phase, which can be thought of as
commencing with the publication of The Ego and the Id (Freud,
1923b), brought considerable changes, many general accounts of
psychoanalytic theory focus on the discoveries and formulations of
the second phase. It is extremely difficult to do justice to the devel-
opments during this second phase in a short account, and in what
follows we have had, of necessity, to be highly selective.
The experiences that led Freud to make the changes that
initiated this phase were documented in his letters to an old
friend, the nose and throat specialist Wilhelm Fliess (Freud,
1950a [1887-19021). These experiences related, on the one hand, to
his clinical work with his patients, and, on the other, to his self-
analysis. Towards the end of the first phase Freud had been study-
ing his patients' dreams and current daydreams. He came to the
view that he could reconstruct (and at times recover in the patients'
memories) childhood events that showed themselves in later be-
haviour, dreams, and symptoms.
It is clear from his correspondence with Fliess that Freud was
heading towards a decisive change in his views during 1897. His
work with his patients and the revelations of his self-analysis led
him finally to the conclusion that many of the memories of sexual
seduction recalled by his patients, or reconstructed by him, were
not in fact memories of real events at all. Rather, they were phan-
tasies that the patient had created in his childhood, daydreams that
had been pushed out of consciousness and subsequently seemed to
operate as if they were indeed memories of real events. Probably
the most powerful force in this realization came from the findings
derived from his self-analysis, which consisted largely of the
systematic recording of his associations to his dreams. In a letter to
Fliess of 21 September 1897 he wrote:
Let me tell you straight away the great secret which has been
slowly dawning on me in recent months. I no longer believe in
my neurotics and the theory that neurosis was caused by child-
hood sexual seduction. That is hardly intelligible without an
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREUD'S THEORY 19

.
explanation. . . So I shall start at the beginning and tell you
the whole story of how the reasons for rejecting it arose. The
first group of factors were the continual disappointment of my
attempts to bring my analyses to a real conclusion, the running
away of people who for a time had seemed my most favour-
ably inclined patients, the lack of the complete success on
which I had counted, and the possibility of explaining my
partial successes in other, familiar, ways. Then there was the
astonishing thing that in every case . . . blame was laid on
perverse ads by the father, and realisation of the unexpected
frequency of hysteria, in every case of which the same thing
applied, though it was hardly credible that perverted acts
against children were so general. [Freud 1950a (1887-1902),
pp. 2152161
Freud later commente:
I must mention an error into which I fell for a while and which
might well have had fatal consequences for the whole of my
work. Under the influence of the technical procedure which I
used at that time, the majority of my patients reproduced from
their childhood scenes in which they were sexually seduced by
some grown-up person. . . .I believed these stories, and conse-
quently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the
subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction
in childhood. . . . however, I was at last obliged to recognize
that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that
they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or
which I myself had perhaps forced on them. . . . When I had
pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclu-
sions from my discovery; namely, that the neurotic symptoms
were not related directly to actual events but to wishful phan-
tasies. [Freud, 1925d (1924), pp. 33-34]
The incestuous incidents recalled by his patients, which he pre-
viously had taken at face value, were now seen as representing
wishes on the part of his patients gratified by fulfilment in phan-
tasy?

It is important to note that Freud did not deny the occurrence of

pathogenic real traumatic events in childhood. For example, in the lntroduc-
t o y Lectures (as in many other of his writings) he said, "Phantasies of being
seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies
20 FOUNDATIONS

Freud was at first puzzled by the direction in which his

observations were to take his theories, but he soon realized that
in these observations lay a basic ingredient of mental functioning
in general, and of mental conflict in particular. Thus a repressed
early wish-fulfilling daydream may find new expression at a later
date in a different form, as a symptom, slip (parapraxis),dream, or
creative work of art. With this we see the abandonment of the
theory of the traumatic origins of the psychoneuroses and a shift of
emphasis instead to the history and vicissitudes of the patient's
inner strivings, and of the struggle to deal with them. The change
in Freud's ideas allowed him to make a major distinction between
"historical" (objective) and "psychical" truth as well as to formu-
late key concepts of psychoanalytic theory, such as repression,
conflict, repetition compulsion, and projection. Moreover, all re-
ality was seen as, to varying degrees, invested with phantasy, so
that memories are not only of events but of thoughts and phan-
tasies as well.
In this context the analysis of dreams became extremely impor-
tant in studying the way in which these psychological impulses
found surface expression. Freud had found dream analysis the
most useful way of conducting his self-analysis and applied this
method more and more to his patients, who were asked to associ-
ate to the individual elements of the dream as they related them
(i.e. to the "manifest content" of the dream). The interpretation of
dreams became "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious
activities of the m i n d (Freud, 1900a, p. 608). Freud's intense in-
terest in dream analysis culminated in the publication of his
most detailed and worked-out psychoanalytic contribution-the
monumental The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). In this work he
elaborated a new framework, which was to form the basis for the
theories of the second phase. Because the psychological model that

but real memories" (1916-17, p. 370).However, in the excitement following his

realization that many recalled memories were of phantasies rather than what
had really occurred, and the implication of this for the theory of neurosis in
adulthood, he neglected at that time to give sufficient emphasis to the reality of
actual childhood traumatic experiences. The profound effects of childhood
traumas on development only came to be understood through the work of later
psychoanalysts.
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREUD'S THEORY 21

he proposed contains the notion of psychological systems related

spatially in depth, it has come to be known as the topographical
model of the mental apparatus.
In the first phase Freud had distinguished between conscious
and unconscious aspects of the mind, and this distinction is elab-
orated in the topographical model, with its three systems-
Conscious, Preconscious, and Unconscious. The Unconscious was
regarded as containing instinctual drives and wishes which, if they
were allowed to emerge into consciousness, would constitute a
danger, a threat, and would give rise to the most unpleasant feel-
ings. The strivings in the Unconscious were thought of as being
constantly propelled towards discharge, but if they are expressed
in consciousness, i.e. manage to reach the system Conscious, or
are expressed in behaviour-they can commonly only achieve this
in a distorted or censored form. A further system was called the
Preconscious, conceived of as containing knowledge, thoughts,
and memories of all sorts that were not defended against, could
enter consciousness freely at the appropriate time, and were
utilized by the individual not only for rational tasks, but could also
be seized upon by wishes from the Unconscious system in their
path from the depths to the surface. The topographical frame of
reference is discussed in later chapters.
The system Unconscious can be regarded as being charac-
terized by a very primitive mode of functioning, which Freud
designated as the primay process. Logical and formal relations be-
tween the elements in the Unconscious are absent, and simple rules
of primitive association apply. Drives and wishes in the Uncon-
scious function only according to what Freud termed the pleasure
principle, i.e. they seek discharge, gratification, and relief of painful
tension at all cost. The systems Preconscious and Conscious could
in a sense be considered to be in opposition to this. Here the second-
ary process-i.e. logic, reason, and the knowledge of external reality
and of our conscious ideals and standards of conduct-predomi-
nates. Unlike the Unconscious, the Preconscious and Conscious
systems follow, or attempt to follow, what Freud called the reality
principle (1911b), and it seems obvious that situations of conflict-
for example, between sexual wishes of a primitive sort and the
person's moral and ethical standards-must inevitably and con-
22 FOUNDATIONS

stantly arise, and that some sort of solution would be sought that
would take opposing forces into account.
In 1901Freud published The Psychopathology if ~ v a y d L@,a ~ in
which a variety of phenomena, such as slips of the tongue and
symbolic actions ("symptomatic acts"), were investigated as ex-
pressions of unconscious impulses. A crucial work in the early part
of the second phase was Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905d). In this the so-called "instin~t"~ theory of psychoanalysis
had its first elaboration. Instinctual drives were seen as the basis
for the whole variety of sexual wishes of childhood and adult life.
Their manifold expression, ranging from normal sexuality to the
perversions, was studied. Indeed, the basis for the "Essays" was
the clinical study of the perversions, leading to the conclusion that
so-called perverse tendencies were present in everyone, although
they might be strenuously fought against and denied. This work
established a link between conscious or unconscious perverse ten-
dencies in adults with normal infantile and childhood sexuality in
its various forms. Psychoanalytic theory now became unequivo-
cally a drive-psychology. The "psychosexual" phases of childhood
(oral, anal, phallic-oedipal) assumed great significance, not only
for later neurotic conflict, but also because they have been used to
provide psychoanalysis with a basic developmental framework7.

%s many have pointed out, much confusion has been generated by

the faulty translation of the German Tneb as "instinct" rather than "drive".
An attempt was subsequently made to remedy this by making use of the
compromise term "instinctual drive", to be distinguished from "instinctive"
tendencies and behaviour studied by ethologists. Throughout the text of this
book the terms "instinct", "drive", "instinctual impulse", and "instinctual
drives" are used synonymously. However, wishes in the system Unconscious
of the topographical model, or of the id of the structural theory, are referred to
as "instinctual wishes".
'For many years the psychoanalytic theory of development emphasized
the centrality of Freud's theory of psychosexual development. It has to be
remembered, however, that this theory was put forward during the second
phase to provide a basis for Freud's theory of neurosis. In later years other
developmental frameworks were devised on the basis of specific clinical prob-
lems and systematic child observation. Thus we have the developmental
theories of Margaret Mahler (see Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975),stimulated
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREUD'S THEORY 23

Because of the historical importance of Freud's theory of

psychosexual development, it is appropriate to spell it out in a little
more detail. The so-called libidinal phases were conceived of on
the basis of the heightened libidinal investment, or cathexis,' of
different bodily erotogenic zones. In the oral phase, occurring more
or less throughout the first year of life, the mouth and lips are the
major sources of sensual pleasure, because of their importance in
feeding. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) add, "The activity of nutri-
tion is the source of the particular meanings through which the
object-relationship is expressed and organised: the love-relation-
ship to the mother, for example, is marked by the meanings of
eating and being eaten" (p. 287).
From some time in the second year to about 3% or 4, the
libidinal dominance of the anal zone is reflected in the child's
preoccupation with the expulsion and retention of faeces. Simul-
taneously there is a pleasure in a whole variety of activities that
are regarded as derivatives of anal erotism. The child relates to his
objects in ways that indirectly reflect the child's concerns with
defecation. He gains pleasure in controlling his environment, as-
pects of which acquire anal symbolic value (e.g. gifts = faeces). In
the succeeding phallic phase, lasting till about the age of 5, both
boys and girls are preoccupied with the genital organs (for Freud
the presence or absence of the penis was seen as the central concern

through her work with psychotic children. We have the "epigenetic" theory of
Erikson, based on his interest in the progressive and life-long interaction be-
tween the individual and society. Melanie Klein based her theory of the
paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions on developmental parallels with
psychotic states; and more recently we have theories of development based on
observations of very young infants (e.g. Daniel Stem's book on The Inter-
personal World of the Infint, 1985). It is clear that there is no (perhaps there can
ever be) one single comprehensive psychoanalytic theory of development.
"The word cathexis was coined by Freud's translators to provide an
English version of the German word Besetzung. However, Besetzung is norm-
ally translated as investment, which is, in our view, a more appropriate transla-
tion;but because cathexis has been in common use, we have used the two words
interhngeably.
24 FOUNDATIONS

of both sexes). In the phallic phase there is the development of the

Oedipus complex, in which there is an
organized body of loving and hostile wishes which the child
experiences towards its parents. In its so-called positive form
the complex appears as in the story of Oedipus Rex: a desire for
the death of the rival-the parent of the same sex--and a
sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. In its negative
form, we find the reverse picture: love for the parent of the
same sex, and jealous hatred for the parent of the opposite sex.
[Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, pp. 282-2831
As Freud saw it, he existence of castration anxiety and the castration
complex during the oedipal phase results in the "dissolution" of
the Oedipus complex, the consolidation of the superego through
internalization of the parents, and entry into the latency phase.
Latency, which was regarded as lasting till puberty, was regarded
by Freud as characterized by a lessening of sexual interest and
activity, an increased interest in non-sexual activities, accompanied
by a desexualization of relationships. In effect, latency was con-
ceived of as a "pause" in sexual devel~pment.~ It is followed by
what Freud referred to as "genital primacy" in puberty, a period in
which the erotogenic zones, so important in the early psychosexual
phases, now become subordinated to the genitals in both men and
women.
Whereas in the first phase of psychoanalysis Freud had concen-
trated on adaptation to events in the external world, his orientation
now shifted to the way in which the individual adapts to internal
forces. While the impact of external forces and occurrences was not
neglected, the theory of the second phase was directly influenced
by the clinical procedure employed by Freud and his by now grow-
ing number of colleagues. The theory reflected the situation in
which the patient lay on the couch, following the so-called "basic
rule" of freeassociation, producing his dreams and his associations

Thie is now regarded as a somewhat idealized view. We know that chil-

dren of so-called latency-age are often extremely preoccupied with sexual
fantasies and masturbatory activities, although there is clearly an upsurge of
sexual interest in pre-adolescenceand adolescence.For the most part the term
"latency"is used nowadays to designate the age range from 5 to 9 or 10 yean,
followed by a period of pre-adolescence, and adolescence proper at about 12
or 13.
to the various dream elements. The analyst was not seen, told the
patient little or nothing of himself, and concealed his own beliefs
and attitudes as far as possible. This highlighted what came from
within the patient, and the theory reflects the preoccupation with
this. A full description of the clinical situation and the relevant
clinical concepts can be found in Sandler, Dare, and Holder (1992),
where the development of such concepts as transference, resist-
ance, acting out, and working through is discussed.
The instinctual wishes characteristic of the system Unconscious
representing infantile bisexual impulses were seen as being de-
rived from the various stages of psychosexual development of the
child, including those intense and ambivalent feelings of sexual
longing, jealousy, and rivalry towards the parents, a constellation
that constitutes the well-known Oedipus complex. It is important
in understanding the formulations of this period to take into
account the fact that Freud initially saw the instinctual wishes as
being predominantly sexual in nature-and gave the energy of
these drives the name "libido". Later in the second phase he added
aggressive wishes to the contents of the Unconscious, but he did
not specify any comparable term for the energy behind aggressive
drives. Freud made a number of changes in his "instinct" theory
during the second phase.
It was during this phase that Freud developed the view that
even the highest and most refined interests in our lives can be
traced in part to transformations of infantile sexual and aggressive
urges that have remained in the Unconscious. He believed that the
cultural pressure that resulted in the transformation of crude
instinctual wishes into more refined and apparently non-sexual
forms was attained by a process to which he attached great impor-
tance-that of sublimation.
In 1914 Freud introduced the concept of narcissism, attempting
to clarify the complicated problem of the person's relation to his
love-objects and himself in both normal and pathological states. In
this paper (1914c), Freud was also concerned with the child's for-
mation of ideals on the basis of his parents as models, and he
introduced the concept of the ego ideal, foreshadowing at this time
the later (third-phase)concept of the superego.
Towards the end of the second phase Freud b e c e e interested
in problems relating to aggression (in all likelihood stimulated by
26 FOUNDATIONS

the savagery of the First World War), and this led him to explore
problems of masochism and aggression turned against the person's
own self, as well as the pathology of severe melancholic depres-
sion. In 1920 he made a speculative biological excursion in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, introducing there the well-known and contro-
versial idea of the "death instinct" or "death drive".
From the point of view of psychoanalytic psychology, a number
of formulations were put forward during the second phase which
remained relatively unchanged in his later work, and many of
these are touched on in later chapters. It is noteworthy that Freud's
writings during the second phase extend through fifteen of the
twenty-four volumes of the Standard Edition.

The third phase:

the structural theory

The third phase can be considered to have begun with the publica-
tion of The Ego and the Id in 1923. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
was published in 1926, and these two works together introduce
substantial changes in Freud's psychoanalytic psychology. They
form the basis of the structural theory, in contradistinction to the
"topographical" theory of the previous phase.1°
Towards the end of the second phase certain inconsistencies
began to be apparent in Freud's view of the mental apparatus
and its functioning. Problems arose because of confusion between
the term "unconscious" used as an adjective to describe all un-
conscious mental content, including the contents of the system
Preconscious on the one hand, and of the system Unconscious (the
"dynamic" Unconscious), which was distinct from the Precon-
scious in the topographical theory, on the other. Problems also
arose because the adjective "preconscious", used by Freud to refer
to material that was freely accessible to consciousness, became
confused with the idea of the Preconscious (originally regarded as
a system), with a barrier or censorship existing between it and the

1" Freud did not in fact refer to this theory as "structural"but spoke of a
"new topography".
system Conscious. In addition to this, Freud had earlier used
the term ego to denote an organization of ideas largely linked with
consciousness, but he gradually moved towards a concept of an
ego in which the relation to consciousness became less crucial than
in the past. During the long second phase, the topographical model
came more and more to be regarded as consisting of organized
functional systems, rather than being based on different qualities
of subjective experience.
Freud introduced the structural theory in 1923 with a discus-
sion of the existence of an unconscious sense of guilt, and he found
it necessary to attribute this to the workings of an organized part of
the mind (the superego) which was not adequately encompassed
by the topographical model. We w add that Freud's formulations
during the second phase in regard to narcissism and the clinical
conditions of melancholia, paranoia, and hypochondriasis all con-
tributed to the strain imposed on the explanatory potential of the
topographical model.
In the structural theory, Freud put forward a model that repre-
sented a tripartite division of the mental apparatus into three major
structures or agencies, which he called id, ego, and superego. The id
corresponds roughly to much of what had previously been encom-
passed by the concept of the Unconscious. It can be regarded as
the area containing the primitive instinctual drives, with all their
hereditary and constitutional elements. It is dominated by the
pleasure principle and functions according to the primary process.
During development a portion of the id undergoes modification,
under the influence of the child's interaction with the external
world, to become the ego. The primary function of this latter agency
is seen as the task of self-preservationand the acquisition of means
whereby a simultaneous adaptation to the pressures of the id, the
superego, and the demands of reality can be brought about. The
ego gains the function of delaying instinctual discharge and of
controlling it by means of a variety of mechanisms, including the
mechanisms of defence. The third agency, the superego, was seen as
developing as a sort of internal precipitate or residue of the child's
early conflicts in relation to his parents, caretakers, or other figures
of authority. It is the vehicle of the conscience, of parental and
cultural values, and of the child's own ideals. A large part of the
28 FOUNDATIONS

superego, as well as of the ego, and all of the id were seen as

functioning outside consciousness.
Consciousness was now seen as a "sense organ" of the ego. The
ego was portrayed as an organization trying to serve three masters
at once--the id, the superego, and the demands of the external
world. Anxiety could be aroused by threats from any one of these
three sources. Instead of anxiety being regarded simply as the way
in which a threatening instinctual wish showed itself in conscious-
ness (via a "transformation" of libidoll), it was now seen quite
differently, i.e. as a specific response of the ego. Inlnhibitions, Symp-
toms and Anxiety (1926d [1925])this was spelled out in detail, with
the ego's anxiety being seen as a signal of danger-ultimately the
danger of being traumatically overwhelmed. The signal of anxiety
prompted the ego to take appropriate adaptive and defensive
measures so that its own integrity and security could be preserved.
Aggression was now given a place in the id as a drive equal to
sexuality, developing a view put forward in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920g).
The concern with the way in which the ego adapted to the
various and often conflicting demands made upon it was reflected
in changes in psychoanalytic technique. The real world, whose
significance had been diminished in the second phase, was now
endowed with some of the importance that had been taken from
it. The ego's mechanisms of defence came to be more intensely
studied and interpreted in the treatment situation.
The third phase in the development of Freud's theories
can be considered as ending with the publication of Freud's
final work, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]).Of course,
during the second and third phases, distinguished contributions
were being made by Freud's colleagues, notably Karl Abraham,
Sandor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, C. G. Jung, and Otto Rank (both the
two last-named were to break with Freud). Although their work

l1 The transformation of libido into anxiety during the second phase was

described by Freud as follows: "One of the most important results of psycho-

analytic research is [the] discovery that neurotic anxiety arises out of libido,
that it is the product of a transformation of it, and that it is thus related to it in
the same kind of way as vinegar is to wine" (1905d,p. 224). This was the view
that he later decisively rejected.
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREUD'S THEORY 29

undoubtedly influenced Freud's thinking to a certain degree, our

presentation of Freud's frames of reference makes no explicit
acknowledgement of contributions from Freud's contemporaries;
nor can any brief account do justice to the contributions of
psy-choanalytic writers other than Freud after his death in 1939.
Nevertheless, we should mention two contributions that, although
written towards the end of Freud's life, had a significant impact
on later developments. Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defence (1936)and Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of
Adaptation (1939)were relatively immediate outcomes of the inno-
vations with regard to the theory of the ego made in the third
phase, and they initiated an important line of development in
psychoanalytic thinking in the area of what came to be known
in the post-war period as "ego psychology". Psychoanalytic theory
has been greatly elaborated after Freud, including a variety of
approaches, among these being the Kleinian school, the self-psy-
chologists, the object relations theorists, and the intersubjectivists.
CHAPTER TWO

Basic assumptions

n the previous chapter the development of Freud's theory was

divided, for our purposes, into three "phases". We regarded
the first as starting from Freud's return to V i e ~ in
a 1886 after
his visit to Charcot, ending in 1897 with his "discovery" that the
traumas produced by his hysterical patients had not necessarily
occurred in reality, but were very often childhood daydreams
that had been expelled from conscious memory (repressed).
This realization (arising in large part from Freud's self-analysis)
led to a crucial reorientation towards the working of the mind and
initiated the long second phase, which lasted until 1923. The quar-
ter of a century of the second phase saw extensivedevelopmentsin
Freud's psychoanalytic theory, and his psychoanalytic psychology
had its main emphasis on the instinctual drives and their vicissi-
tudes, which had not been the case in the first phase. The third
phase, from 1923to 1940, began with the introduction of the "struc-
tural" theory, with the ego seen as a central agency adapting to
demands from id, superego, and the external world. This phase
was also characterized by a revision of the theory of anxiety and
further considerations of the theory of psychoanalytic technique.
 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS 31

The division into phases is, to some extent, arbitrary and artificial,
but it is useful for our purposes, for it enables us to construct, in the
chapters that follow, a series offrames of reference corresponding to
the different phases as we have described them.
It seems appropriate to supplement the description of the his-
torical context and phases given in the previous chapter with a
short account of what have been called "basic hypotheses", "fund-
amental concepts", and so forth and which we will refer to as basic
assumptions. We do not propose to discuss the semantic, philo-
sophical, and scientific issues involved, but rather to present the
basic psychoanalytic tenets from the point of view of their being
indispensable cornerstones,without any one of which the whole of
Freud's theoretical structure would collapse (see Rapaport, 1967).
Underlying Freud's theory of mind are his "metapsychological
points of view". He described three: the dynamic, the economic, and
the topographical or structural. The dynamic point of view considers
mental processes as being the outcome of the interplay of forces
(originating in instinctual drives), often in conflict with one an-
other. The economic viewpoint underlines the importance of vari-
ations in the quantity of mental forces and of the relative strength of
such forces (conceived of as mental "energies"). Freud remarked
that "it is the purpose of the mental apparatus to hinder any
damming-up of these energies and to keep as low as possible the
total amount of the excitations with which it is loaded" (1926d
[1925], p. 266). The topographical or structural standpoint "regards
the mental apparatus as a compound instrument, and endeavours
to determine at what points in it the various mental processes take
place" (1926d [1925], p. 266). After Freud, two important further
metapsychological viewpoints were added (see Rapaport & Gill,
1959).The genetic point of view, which could also be referred to as
a developmental one, is that the adult's mental processes are a
product of processes that have occurred since earliest childhood
and can only be understood in terms of the individual's past.' The
adaptive viewpoint takes into account the fact that people live in

"Genetic" in psychoanalysis refers to the "genesis"or origins of some

aspect of psychological functioning, and not to inheritance (although inherit-
ance does, naturally, play a part in the individual's development).
32 FOUNDATIONS

certain social and cultural contexts, with which they interact and
which they adapt and adapt to.
Before presenting our own list of basic assumptions (which is
not necessarily complete), it may be of interest to examine what
some early authors regarded as "fundamental" or "basic". Freud,
in writing of the "cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory", de-
scribed them as follows:
The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes,
the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, the
appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus
complex-these constitute the principal subject-matter of
psycho-analysis and the foundations of its theory. No one who
cannot accept them all should count himself a psychoanalyst.
[Freud, 1923a [1922],p. 2471
In 1949 Alexander spoke of "two fundamental postulates".
These were, first, that "minds can study minds" and, secondly, that
"The functions of the mind are as truly biological as locomotion
and breathing and are adaptive mechanisms. . . . In the present
state of our knowledge . . . the psychological approach gives a
. . . detailed insight into these complex biological functions"
(pp. 33-35).
Bremer writes of "two fundamental hypotheses" that "have
received so much confirmation and appear to be so fundamentalin
their significance that we are inclined to view them as established
laws of the-mind.Two such fundamental hypotheses, which have
been abundantly confirmed, are the principle of psychic deter-
minism,or causality, and the proposition that consciousness is an
exceptional rather than a regular attribute of psychic processes"
(1973, pp. 1-2).
In the psychoanalytic literature reference is also made to psy-
chological determinism, the role of the unconscious2,the concept
of motivation (the "goal-directed quality of human behaviour"),
and the genetic approach (current events depend upon the past

The we of the term "theuncansdous" i a one of the sources of confusion

in presentations of psychoanalytic theory. The reference in the text may be
to the system Unconscious, or it may be ueed descriptively for unconscious
processes in general; this ir diecussed further in Chapter 4.
 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS 33

"in creative interaction with the present"). In this context it

is appropriate to stress the importance of Freud's clinically
relevant concept of the "compulsion to repeat" (the repetition com-
pulsion). In Freud's paper "Remembering, Repeating and Work-
ing-Through" (1914g), he pointed out that patients tend to repeat,
in their transference relationship to the analyst, patterns of think-
ing, feeling, and behaving of their early life. The repetition compul-
sion occurs outside analysis, in normal as well as in pathological
relationships. Moreover, experiences of the past repeated in
the present are not simply those that were pleasant-they could
be painful and distressing. In regard to traumas of the past, the
patient may attempt to master actively what had been passively
experienced. The repetition compulsion was linked to the death
instinct by Freud in his later writings.
In a series of lectures given in 1944, Rapaport (1967) discusses
the tenets or axioms of Freudian psychoanalytic psychology.
He refers to the postulates of continuity, meaning, determinism,
instinct (instinctual drive), and the unconscious. Others (e.g.
Holzman, 1970; Waelder, 1960) have considered the general
assumptions of psychoanalytic theory from the point of view of the
understanding of clinical phenomena. On the whole, later authors
have simply repeated earlier statements about the basic assump-
tions.
In the following sections we present our own list of basic
assumptions, in which we take a broader view of Freud's psycho-
analytic theory (as evident from the first hypothesis discussed).To
some extent the assumptions overlap with one another, and all are
interrelated.

Psychoanalysis as a general psychology

While for Freud the term "psychoanalysis" referred to a specific

treatment method, to a body of data collected by the psychoana-
lytic method, he also saw it as a basis for understanding and
explaining normal as well as abnormal psychological phenomena.
Pathological manifestations could be understood by means of the
more general psychology of psychoanalysis.If we take the parallel
34 FOUNDATIONS

with organic medicine, this would be equivalent to saying that the

field of somatic pathology, although possessing certain specific
features of its own, is embedded in the more general theory of
somatic functioning, which includes the consideration of normal
bodily processes and their interaction. Indeed, one may go further
and take the general view that the pathological can only be fully
understood in terms of the n ~ r m a l . ~

Unconscious mental functioning

The idea of unconscious mental functioning is central to all psycho-

analytic theories of normal as well as of abnormal mental pro-
cesses. This basic hypothesis is one that Freud derived from his
previous scientific and philosophical education, rather than being a
new "discovery". Nevertheless, it is absolutely fundamental to
psychoanalytic psychology, and Freud's systematic use and elabo-
ration of the concept, as well as the psychoanalytic method he
devised to explore unconscious processes, has raised it to a special
status. For psychoanalysis, it is a basic tenet that behaviour and
subjective experience can have unconscious determinants. The
hypothesis includes the view that a large part of the mental
apparatus, indeed by far the largest part of it, functions outside
conscious experience; it also includes the view that psychological
adaptation occurs for the most part unconsciously, and that the
principle of psychological determinism applies as equally to un-
conscious as to co.@cious processes and events.
It is of some importance to note that it is not only psychological
structures and organizations that are assumed to be capable of
existing outside consciousness. Ideas and other subjective experi-
ences (including feelings) can also be regarded as existing
unconsciously in one form or another, i.e. below the threshold of
conscious awareness. As Freud commented: "Mental processes are
..
in themselves unconscious and . of all mental life it is only cer-

One of the distinguishing featuresof Freud's general psychoanalyticpsy-

chology is its emphasis, in both normal and abnonnal mental functioning, on
the role of instinctual drives and of mental conflict.
 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS 35

tain individual acts and portions that are conscious. . . . [Psycho-

analysis] is obliged to maintain that there is unconscious thinking
and unapprehended willing" (Freud, 1916-17, pp. 21-22).

The mental apparatus

Freud's assumption of the existence of a mental apparatus implies

the existence of a stable, or relatively stable, organization in the
individual. While it may be argued validly that psychological
processes are a function of the nervous system, psychoanalysis
assumed that psychological phenomena can be conceptualized as
involving a psychological "apparatus"'. In effect, the concept of a
mental apparatus here too parallels the physiologist's concepts of
the cardiovascular, nervous, digestive, genitourinary, and other
systems. It is an added system, which is psychological rather than
organic, although it is influenced by and has effects on the other
systems. From the Freudian point of view, psychology can be re-
garded as the study of the mind and its functioning, just as
disciplines such as physiology, anatomy, and biochemistry study
the somatic apparatuses and their functions. The notion of a mental
apparatus implies the idea of processes involving psychological
"structures"-psychological or@zations with a slow rate of
change (l7apaport)-but psychoanalytic psychology includes the
study of behaviour not only in terms of psychological structures
and functions, but also in terms of subjective experience.
The mental apparatus has been regarded as relatively simple in
early life, increasing in complexity in the course of development.
Thus it is capable of modification, and its development is a func-
tion both of maturation and of the forces entering into psychologi-
cal adaptation (in the sense in which adaptation is discussed
below).

The term "mental apparatus" sounds clumsy and mechanistic, as we

are more distant from Freud's scientific background. Nowadays there is a
tendency to speak rather of "mind"or to use such terms as "psychic organiza-
tion".
36 FOUNDATIONS

Psychological adaptation

Psychological adaptation is the assumption that the apparatus

functions (among other things) to maintain a "steady state" (it can
be compared with the physiological notion of homeostasis), in the
face of constant disturbances of inner equilibrium. It should be
emphasized that such disturbances may arise from outside the
individual, as well as from within. In the first phase, emphasis was
placed on the experience of trauma as a source of disequilibrium.
In the second phase, such disequilibrium is predominantly related
to the "demand for work" placed on the mental apparatus by the
drives. In the third phase, weight was given to the demands of
the external world as well as to those of the id and the superego
as sources of disequilibrium? Indeed, from the point of view of
psychoanalytic psychology, all behaviour and experiences can be
related to processes of psychological adaptation6to disturbances of
the "steady state". The processes of adaptation in turn may bring
about changes in the structure and mode of functioning of the
mental apparatus.
Closely involved with the idea of adaptation are the concepts of
conflict as a source of disequilibrium and of defences as particular
adaptive manoeuvres of the mental apparatus.

Psychological determinism

In the first phase Freud took the idea of determinism from the
physical sciences of the time and applied it to the psychological
sphere. Briefly, it was the belief that every aspect of behaviour or
subjective experience, and every aspect of the functioning of the

Disturbances of the equilibrium of the mental apparatus arising from

within the body can be regarded as originating outside the mental apparatus
and impinging on it.
"is approach to adaptation is radically different from that which empha-
sizes adaptation to the social environment only. From the psychoanalytic point
of view, even the grossest pathology may be considered to be the outcome of
attempts at psychological adaptation.
 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS 37

mental apparatus, can be seen as the outcome of the events (psy-

chological as well as non-psychological) that precede it. The term
implied that theoretically it should be possible to predict and to
explain a psychological "event" in terms of all the forces operative
at the time and which have operated in the past. While Freud
adhered to this theoretical view, he was aware that in practice such
precision is impossible, although he made the assumption that
every psychological manifestation or experience stands in a defi-
nite and theoretically explicable relationship to the whole of the
person's psychological life. Psychological determinism was some-
times referred to as the principle of causality.
The importance of this assumption for psychoanalysis is that it
led Freud to look for causes. This does not mean that the causes will
always be found. If we allow a stone to roll down a hill, we can
assume that the position in which it finally comes to rest is deter-
mined by such factors as its shape, weight, consistency, and the
whole sequence of forces acting on it. This does not mean that all
the factors that caused the stone to end up where it did can readily
be discovered, nor indeed that it would be useful to amass such a
wealth of information regarding such an event. What is important
in regard to Freud's assumption of psychological determinism is
the point of view that reasons for mental events can be found, that
mental events do not occur entirely at random or at the caprice of
some supernatural force. Thus the "free associations" of a patient
are not regarded as random thoughts; it is assumed, rather, that
there is some underlying connection, however complicated, be-
tween the different associations produced by the patient.
Drawing on the model of the physical sciences of the time,
Freud attempted to simplify matters by the construction of laws
and principles (such as the pleasure principle and the reality prin-
ciple). As these are simplifications and generalizations, their
"truth lies in their usefulness in particular circumstances. On the
whole, in spite of Freud's belief in determinism, the "laws" relating
to mental functioning can be considered as laws of probability.
However, the practicing psychoanalyst takes the view that the
more one knows of specific features of the individual's behaviour
and of his mental processes and experience, the more certain one
can be of the conclusions drawn. Generally speaking, no single
cause was regarded by Freud as being a sufficient explanation for
38 FOUNDATIONS

a phenomenon, and the further assumption of multiple causes

(overdetermination) was made?
Psychological determinism has sometimes been seen as being
in conflict with the idea of "free will". In our view this conflict has,
on the whole, been exaggerated. An individual may possess a high
degree of internal security and be in a position to exercise his
judgement consciously in regard to which one of a number of
courses he will decide to pursue. Nevertheless, the individual's
final decision or action can be regarded as the outcome of the
operation of many factors, incliding those entering into his assess-
ment and judgement of the situation. However, because of the
assumption of the existence of unconscious mental functioning (see
below), Freud took the view that many actions that appear on the
surface to be a consequence of free acts of will are inevitably deter-
mined by the influence of unconscious psychological forces acting
on the individual.
There are a number of misconceptions arising from the
hypothesis of psychological determinism. One of these is that
the psychoanalyst can "explain" every psychological event.
Another is that all psychological events are the consequence of
purely psychological "causes". And a further misconception is
that the psychoanalyst believes that evey act or piece of conscious
experience is entirely the outcome of unconscious forces operating
in the present (particularly unconscious instinctual wishes)?

It is perhaps more appropriate that psychoanalysts, like most workers in

the social sciences, think in terms of reasons, which are tied to rules, rather than
causes linked to laws and explanations. Reasons have to be understood, rather
than explained, and have to be contextualized, i.e. understood and integrated
into the appropriate context.
Vt is certainly true that some psychoanalysts believe that it is possible to
"explain" everything the patient brings to analysis. This is particularly true of
those who believe that all later behaviour is determined by the events and
experiences occurring in the first months and years of life. However, it should
be said that most psychoanalysts subscribe to the view that early experiences
are signijbnt factors in determining later mental functioning, particularly in
relation to the appearance of psychological illness. We would again emphasize
that the importance placed by psychoanalysts on early experiences and re-
actions does not mean that everything that occurs later has been predetermined
by them.
 PART II

First phase:
the affect-trauma
frame o f reference
CHAPTER THREE

The affect-trauma model

I
n the opening chapters, which introduced this series of frames
of reference, we began an attempt to provide an overview of
Freudian psychoanalytic psychology. This was regarded as
necessary both because of the complexity of Freud's ideas and
because no integrated theory exists. It was felt by us that the subject
could be approached by dividing the history of the development of
Freud's theories into phases, proceeding next to sketch the outlines
of what we have referred to asframes of reference appropriate to
each phase. Three historical phases were delineated, together with
corresponding frames of reference:

First phase (up to 1897):the affect-trauma frame of reference

Second phase (1897-1923): the topographical frame of reference
Third phase (1923-1940): the structural frame of reference

The present chapter is concerned with the affect-trauma frame

of reference, derived from Freud's thinking up to 1897. Its essence
lies in the emphasis on external events as instigators of pathology,
42 FIRST PHASE: THE AFFECT-TRAUMA FRAME

and on the role played by trauma and "charges of affect" in normal

and abnormal mental functioning.' This first phase is not only of
historical significance.Many of the concepts introduced during it
remained, in one form or another, in Freud's later thinking (and
also in subsequent psychoanalytic theory).
For example, the concept of trauma persisted more or less un-
changed in Freud's work. The idea that a repressed traumatic
experience may lie behind the patient's psychopathology, and
the hope that this can be recovered, together with the abreaction
(catharsis) of the associated emotions, still affects the psychoana-
lytic treatment of the neuroses. The notion of quantities of affect,
held back in a "pent-up" state, endures (with a certain clinical
validity), and enters into descriptions of psychoanalytic treatment
("The patient was at last able to release the hostile feelings he had
kept back for so long", etc.).
The concept of mental energy and its discharge played a crucial
role in later formulations in psychoanalytic psychology. After the
first phase, energy became more specifically linked with the in-
stinctual drives (as in the idea of "libidinal energy"), and affect or
emotion was no longer equated with mental energy.
The concept of defence, introduced in the first phase, has
remained. Initially, defence was seen as directed only against un-
welcome affects, but in later phases ideas about what is defended
against have changed. Distinctions between defences against
drives, ideas, and affects came to be made.
Other concepts--such as that of the ego-were radically altered
in later phases. Each of the first two phases left a legacy of ideas
that have been, where it has proved possible, incorporated into
Freud's later conceptualizations.It is our contention that an under-
standing of the essential concepts of each phase is necessary for the
comprehension of what has developed later, and for the under-

"Chargeof affect" refers to the investment of memory, thought, wish, or

phantasy with emotion. Abreaction refers to the release of pent-up emotions,
with consequent relief. In the first phase, abreaction was regarded as therapeu-
tic, although later Freud became aware that its "curative" effect was only
temporary.
 THE AFFECT-TRAUMA MODEL 43

standing of the many inconsistencies that still exist in psychoana-

lytic psychology.

The mental apparatus

in the affect-trauma frame of reference

In common with the other Freudian frames of reference, the exist-

ence of a mental (or psychic) "apparatus" is assumed in the first
phase. In the affect-trauma frame of reference, as in others, it is
regarded as a psychological organization, within which psycho-
logical processes occur, and is conceived of as being relatively
rudimentary in early childhood, increasing in complexity during
the course of development. It functions as a vehicle for adaptation
to demands from both internal and external sources, although-
and this is of the greatest importance--in this first frame of
reference adaptation to experiences derivingfrom external reality (trau-
mas) is emphasi~ed.~
Among the other functions of the mental apparatus are the
control and discharge of excitation, as well as the function of de-
fence against distressing affects and "incompatible" ideas. The
latter ideas are those that are rejected as being unacceptable to the
conscious standards, ideals, beliefs, and wishes of the individual. A
further function of the apparatus is to lay down memory traces.
Associative links between such traces are created, these links being

While Freud acknowledged, in the first phase, the influence of internal

biological and psychological needs and pressures and their influence on the
mental apparatus, these were considered to be of secondary importance. The
fuller appreciation of the role of internal forces was to come later, indeed rather
dramatically (1950a [1887-19021, pp. 220-228). During the first phase, due to
the weight of the clinical evidence pertaining to the crucial significance of real
events in the person's life, the emphasis on the quantity of stimulationimping-
ing on the apparatus from the side of the external world was very much greater
in that phase than that given to the amount of stimulation arising from internal
sunUce8.
44 FIRST PHASE: THE AFFECT-TRAUMA FRAME

based on such factors as contemporaneity and similarity of the

content of the events recorded. Attention, perception, and the
transformation of mental energy (see below) from one state to
another are regarded as further functions of the apparatus.
Development brings about a differentiation within the appara-
tus. One of these differentiated aspects is referred to as the ego3, a
term that is used in this frame of reference to designate both con-
sciousness and a capacity to perform the function of defence. The
ego is thought of as coming into existence on the basis of the
interaction between biological needs (which create sums of excita-
tion in the apparatus) and the external world (which produces
substantially larger amounts of excitation).A constitutional dispo-
sition (Anlage)for the development of the ego is assumed. Hand in
hand with the appearance of the ego in the sense of conscious
awareness there develops the capacity for splitting off memories
and ideas that are incompatible with consciousness,and which are
relegated to an unconscious part of the mind. This dissociation of
certain contents and associated emotions is brought about by pro-
cesses of defence, initiated by the ego (see Figure 3.1).

Mental energy
In this first phase, the mental apparatus is regarded as deploying
and regulating mental energy, which can exist in a number of differ-
ent states. It can be quiescent, in which case a state of equilibrium
exists, in accordance with Fechner's well-known "principle of con-
stancy". Alternatively, mental energy can exert a force, associated
with disequilibrium in the mental apparatus, creating a "pressure
towards discharge", i.e. a so-called "demand" for the restoration
of the constant state (energic homeostasis). The apparatus thus
functions in the direction of maintaining a certain equilibrium,

The meaning of the term "ego"was to change radically with the develop-
ment of psychoanalytic theory. In the first phase, it was more or less
synonymous with consciousness and "conscious self", whereas in the third
phase it was no longer equated with consciousness, but was seen as a highly
complex structure, essentially unconscious,with consciousness being regarded
as a "sense-organ"of the ego.
 THE AFFECT-TRAUMA MODEL 45

Active dissociation
from consciousness
by the ego

Pathway of discharge
bypassing consciousness
)r

/ conscious
I unconscious

Ego = conscious lncompatlble ideas

awareness and distressing
and source affects, now
of defence unconscious

FIC;URE 3.1: A schematic representation of the affect-trauma frame

of reference showing dissociation (repression) of mental content un-
acceptable to the ego.

i.e. towards operating at a relatively constant and low level of

excitation. Mental energy is regarded as a quantity that may be
augmented or diminished by stimulation or discharge, respec-
tively. Affect or emotion is equated with energic excitation?

Freud used the "working hypothesis" that "in mental functions some-
thing is to be distinguished-a quota of affect or sum of excitation-which
possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of
measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and
diecharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as
an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body" (Freud, 1894a, p. 60).
46 FIRST PHASE: THE AFFECT-TRAUMA FRAME

Defences
If there is an arousal of emotional excitation associated with an
idea, it can be dealt with in a number of ways. Normal processes
such as motor action and the conscious expression of emotions may
suffice for "discharge" if the amount of energy involved is not too
great.5 However, if the energy and associated ideas are treated
as threatening and potentially overwhelming to the ego (i.e. "in-
compatible"), they may be dealt with by a special psychological
mechanism (defence) that serves to protect consciousness by
producing a form of dissociation of emotion and ideas from con-
sciousness. This process may or may not lead to pathology.
The basic defence is regarded as being repression. It is a "push-
ing away" (Verdrangung) of unacceptable ideas and associated
emotions, so that these are relegated to the unconscious part of the
apparatus. If repression is successful, no trace of the distressing
idea or feeling remains in consciousness, but a quantity of emo-
tional excitation remains "dammed up" or "strangulated" outside
consciousness. Repression is also the simplest of the defences. An
instance of its operation (given by Freud) is the case of a person
having forgotten and being unable to recall something that he or
she had read (and which could normally have been remembered)
because the content of the particular passage aroused unpalatable
memories of past sexual events. These memories and associated
emotions then gave rise to an affective reaction of repugnance, and
the mernories, affects, and also the associated content of what had
been recently read, were "pushed away" from consciousness, i.e.
repressed.
The defence of substitution is concerned with the transferring of
a certain affect from an "incompatible idea" to one that can be
tolerated in consciousness. Freud (1895c [1894]) gives an example,
typical of obsessional pathology, in a description of a girl who
reproached herself for things that she knew were absurd-for hav-
ing stolen, made counterfeit money, and so on. Originally she had

Freud also wrote, in the first phase, of other processes involved in the
reduction of energic (emotional) tension-a normal "wearing away" along
associative pathways and "absorption"of relatively small quantities of energy
over a period of time.
 THE AFFECT-TRAUMA MODEL 47

reproached herself for her secret masturbation. The feelings of self-

reproach and guilt could be permitted to emerge in association
with the "absurd" compulsive thoughts that replaced the memory
of the masturbation.
Finally, the defence of transformation of affect is concerned with
the replacement of one affect by another. This accounts for the
appearance of anxiety as a consequence of the transformation of
some other "strangulated affect"!
While the defensive efforts on the part of the mental apparatus
are regarded as fundamental and necessary for normal mental
functioning, their excessive use may lead to pathology. It should be
remembered that in the first phase, and in this frame of reference,
the predominant emphasis is placed on processes of defence
against quantities of affect. These may (a) threaten to overwhelm the
conscious ego in a painful fashion, or (b) cause a painful state
because they are associated with ideas (particularly those based on
memories) that consciousness finds repugnant.

Pathogenic processes

In the affect-trauma frame of reference, pathological processes

are seen as particular processes of adaptation to a disequilibrium in
the mental apparatus resulting from an intense charge of affective
energy associated with certain memories. If the energy cannot be
dealt with normally, then it may find expression in one or other
form of psychological disturbance. A major cause of the dis-
equilibrium is a trauma, although there are other causes as well
(as in the so-called "actual" neuroses). Special emphasis is placed

Freud described this when he remarked that "The affect of the self-
reproach may be transformed by various psychical processes into other affects,
which then enter consciousnessmore clearly than the affect itself: for instance,
into anxiety (fear of the consequences of the action to which the self-reproach
applies), hypochondria (fearof its bodily effects), delusions of persecution (fear of
its social effects), shame (fear of other people knowing about it), and so on"
(Freud, 1950a [1887-19021, p. 224).
48 FIRST PHASE: THE AFFECT-TRAUMA FRAME

on the occurrence of events-particularly sexual experiences-in

the patient's life that may, as a consequence of repression, lead to a
state of "dammed-up" affect that, because of the need of the con-
scious ego to defend itself against being overwhelmed by painful
feelings, can only find a psychopathological expression. As a result
the dammed-up affectmay find a disguised and distorted expres-
sion in the neurotic symptom.
It is worth mentioning that the formulations of the first phase
represented a major attempt to explain the occurrence of patho-
logical conditions (such as conversion hysteria) in terms of mental
processes-psychological conflict, the effect of distressing or
threatening affects, mental traumas, and the psychological effect of
sexual factors such as seductions, frustrations, and so forth. How-
ever, the possible contributions from the side of hereditary and
constitutional predispositions are given a place as well. Indeed,
such factors, inherent in the make-up of the individual, are consid-
ered to play a part in explaining why a person may develop one
type of pathology rather than another, or none at all. It is the
interaction of constitutional factors with the specific experiences of
the individual that is regarded as important in determining the
way in which the mental apparatus adapts to the forces acting on
it, and whether or not pathological processes will ensue. If these do
develop, then both sets of relevant factors interact to determine the
form of the pathological adaptation?

Mental trauma
The mental apparatus can only cope with a certain amount of
stimulation or excitation at any one time. This depends to some
extent on the degree of maturity of the apparatus. If it is exposed to

Freud put it as follows: "Since there is no such thing as chance in neurotic

pathogenesis any more than anywhere else, it must be allowed that it is not
heredity that presides over the choice of the particular nervous disorder which
is to develop in the predisposed member of a family, but that there are grounds
for suspecting the existence of other aetiological influences, of a less incompre-
hensible nature, which would then deserve to be called the specific aetiology of
such and such a nervous affection. Without the existence of this special aetio-
 THE AFFECT-TRAUMA MODEL 49

too great a quantity of affective energy it can be overwhelmed, i.e.

the normal stimulus barrier can be breached. In childhood the im-
mature apparatus is more prone to be overcome by a sudden influx
of stimulation (i.e. energy that the child is unable to regulate by
appropriate and controlled discharge along normal channels).
The state of being helplessly overwhelmed by unmanageable
excitation is that of mental ("psychic", "psychical", or "psychologi-
cal") trauman.Although trauma is defined unambiguously in this
way, it is necessary to distinguish (because of the relevance to
pathological processes as understood in this frame of reference)
between the follo~ing:~

1 . Current traumas, i.e. those that represent an overwhelming of

the mental apparatus by energy as an immediate or relatively
immediate response to a real situation or event. Such traumas
occur, for example, as a consequence of accidents or assaults,
which may be followed by the appearance of neurotic symp-
toms.
2 . Retroactive traumas. While these are not in essence different from
current traumas, in that they represent a state of being over-
whelmed by uncontrollable energy, they differ from current
traumas in their time relation to the significant environmental
event. In the case of these traumas, the memory traces of the

logical factor, heredity could have done nothing; it would have lent itself to the
production of another nervous disorder if the specific aetiology in question had
been replaced by some other influence" (Freud, 1896a,p. 145).It is interesting
to note that this is still a major field of investigation in the human sciences.
"ere has always been some confusion and ambiguity about the term
"trauma" in psychoanalytic writings. The term is used in relation to a specific
subjective experience, to the event bringing such an experience about, and to
the long-term consequences that may follow such an experience. (For a discus-
sion of the conceptual problems involved see Sandler, 1967;Sandler, Dreher, br
Drews, 1991.)
Because the emphasis in the first phase was placed so much on the
pathogenic effect of external events, the distinction between the different types
of trauma is important.With the shift of emphasis to the role of the drives and
assodated phantasies in the second phase, the distinction between categories of
trauma became less significant.
50 FIRST PHASE: THE AFFECT-TRAUMA FRAME

event (usually in childhood) have been registered in the appa-

ratus often long before the trauma actually occurs. The retroac-
tive traumas are linked with certain events that, though exciting,
were not experienced as traumatic at the time of their occurrence (e.g.
some experiences, particularly sexual seductions, in which the
individual played a passive role, occurring in childhood). How-
ever, the memories of these events, which had been repressed
because they were unacceptable, give rise to a trauma when
they become revived and reinforced by an experience in later
life. The trauma that then occurs is a result of the apparatus
being overcome by a combination of the revived excitement of
the past, together with strong affective reactions on the part
of the ego, reactions such as shame, disgust, self-reproach, and
anxiety. A state of conflict arises because what had been re-
pressed in childhood (and consequently had not overwhelmed
the ego) represents something that is unacceptable to the per-
son's current standards of morality and conduct; this now
threatens to overwhelm the ego and to bring about a powerful
affective reaction on the ego's part to the revived memory and
to the excitement associated with it.lo

Concepts of neurosis

In the first phase the symptoms of "nervous" disorder were

thought of as being the consequence of pent-up or "strangulated"
affect that could not be dealt with by normal processes of "dis-
charge". While a certain quantity of affective energy can normally
be contained by repression, if it is beyond a certain amount the
affect charge may find an alternative expression in some form of
involuntary symptom. The symptom thus represents a manifesta-

lo In speaking of the aetiology of hysteria, Freud says: "The event of which

the subject has retained an unconscious memory is a precocious experience of

sexual relations with actual excitement of the genitals, resultingfrom sexual abuse
committed by another person; and the period of life at which this fatal event takes
place is earliest youth-the years up to the age of eight to ten, before the child
has reached sexual maturity. . . . The memory will operate as though it were a
contemporary event" (Freud, 1896a, pp. 152-154).
 THE AFFECT-TRAUMA MODEL 51

tion, in disguised form, of the repressed affect and the ideas

attached to it.
It is not our intention to go into the various forms of pathology
considered in the first phase in any great detail in this chapter.
However, it is appropriate to point out that Freud distinguished
between the psychoneuroses (or neuro-psychoses) and the actual
neuroses. We pointed out in Chapter 1 that the word "actual" is
a misleading translation of the German prefix aktual, which refers
to something current, in the present. The psychoneuroses take two
main forms: hysteria and obsessional neurosis. The actual neuroses
were also thought to take two main forms, representing the third
and fourth of the "major neuroses".ll These are neurasthenia and
anxiety neurosis. The difference between the actual neuroses and the
psychoneuroses is that in the former the symptoms are regarded as
manifestations of current physical sexual factors rather than psy-
chological ones.

1. Hysteria. Whereas this condition had traditionally been re-

garded by psychiatrists as the result of degeneracy, it was seen
by Freud to be a specific reaction of the mental apparatus to a
mental trauma. Hysteria is regarded as having been deter-
mined by the real traumatic experiences which are reproduced
in asymbolicfashion in somatic symptoms.It is this that gives the
condition its special character. But, as Freud put it (1896a), "no
hysterical symptom can arisefrom a real experience alone, but that in
evey case the memoy of earlier experiences awakened in association
to it plays a part in causing the symptom" (Freud, 1896c, p. 197).
In hysteria the charge of affect is transformed by being "dis-
charged" along a path of motor or sensory innervation. "In
hysteria, the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by its

l1 Freud also distinguished the "traumatic neurosis" proper, in which the

symptoms are regarded as a consequence of a physical rather than mental

trauma. This was particularly important towards the end of the century be-
cause of the introductionof the railways and the many accidents that followed.
It was important for neurologists to make the differential diagnosis between
the consequences of actuel lesions of the nervous system and psychogenic
traumatic neuroses with psychogenic symptoms which might give rise to
daimsfor compensation.
52 FIRST PHASE: THE AFFECT-TRAUMA FRAME

sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic. For this

I should like to propose the name of conversion" (Freud, 1894a,
p. 49).12Thus in hysteria, mechanisms of dissociation and con-
version could bring about motor paralyses, fits, anaesthesia,
pains, and even certain hallucinations.

Obsessional neurosis. Whereas in hysteria the sum of excitation

that finds pathological discharge was "transformed into
something somatic", in the second of the major neuroses (which
includes a number of phobias that have an obsessional quality)
the individual concerned lacks "the capacity for conversion"
(1894a). The affect, now separated from the "incompatible
idea", is obliged to remain in the psychical sphere. The idea,
now weakened, is still left in consciousness, separated from all
association.But its affect, which has become free, attaches itself
to other ideas that are not in themselves incompatible and,
thanks to this "false connection", turn into obsessional ideas
(1894a).
As in hysteria, the distressingaffect is thought to have arisen
from the subject's sexual life, and the main mechanism of
defence involved is repression. However, a mechanism also
involved in obsessional neurosis is "substitution". Whereas in
obsessions we may get a whole range of affective states (such as
doubt, remorse, shame, self-reproaches, anger, etc.), in those
phobias that come under the heading of obsessional neurosis
the distressing affect is always that of anxiety.

3. Neurasthenia. A variety of physical symptoms, including

fatigue, dyspepsia with flatulence, and indications of intra-
cranial pressure and spinal irritation are included by Freud in
this category. The condition, Freud thought, is acquired "by
excessive masturbation or arises spontaneously from frequent
emissions" (Freud, 1898a, p. 268).

12 The concept of conversion, although deriving from the first phase of

psychoanalysis, and at that time thought to involve a transformation of energy,
is still in current use, although it is not now regarded as involving a trans-
formation of energy.
 THE AFFECT-TRAUMA M O D E L 53
Originally Freud included the symptoms of anxiety neuro-
sis in the category of neurasthenia, but these were separated
from neurasthenia "proper" (1895b [1894]).However, through-
out the first phase he emphasized the existence of clinically
"mixed" pictures, and neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis were
thought to coexist in many cases, even though they were re-
garded as separate conditions. Hereditary factors were seen as
being of minimal importance in neurasthenia. Greater impor-
tance is given to the strains imposed by civilization, with the
factors of overwork, fatigue, and exhaustion combining with
"sexual noxae" to produce the illness.

4. Anxiety neurosis. The specific cause of an anxiety neurosis "is

the accumulation of sexual tension, produced by abstinence or
by unconsummated sexual excitation" (1895c [1894], p. 81).
While the essential causes of the anxiety neurosis are regarded
as physical, it produces psychological symptoms, including
phobias (although some phobias are regarded as being more
closely related to obsessional neurosis). The clinical picture
included the following symptoms: general irritability, anxious
expectation (this is regarded as the nuclear symptom of the
anxiety neurosis, being a quantity of anxiety that is "free-float-
ing" and can link itself to any suitable idea), anxiety attacks,
pavor nocturnus (night terrors), and vertigo.
While anxiety neurosis may either be "acquired" or a conse-
quence of hereditary factors, the "acquired" aspects are due to
the effect of sexual "noxae" resulting (in men) from abstinence,
states of unconsummated excitation, the practice of coitus
interruptus, and senescence. In women, predisposing factors
were regarded by Freud as "virginal anxiety" ("first-night
nerves"), abstinence, the effects of the climacterium, as well as
marriage to a husband suffering from premature ejaculation or
impotence or who practices coitus interruptus. In both sexes,
masturbation and overwork were thought to be contributing
factors.
The emphasis in all of this is on the accumulation of
undischarged somatic tensions, which are then transformed
into anxiety. The anxiety thus has a physical rather than a
psychological origin. Freud remarked: "The mechanism of
54 FIRST PHASE: THE AFFECT-TRAUMA FRAME

anxiety neurosis is to be looked for in a deflection of somatic

sexual excitation . . . and in a consequent abnormal employ-
ment of that excitation" (1895b [1894], p. 108).It is worth noting
that Freud explicitly distinguishes these somatic sexual ten-
sions from the energy represented by sexual affect, already
referred to in the first phase as "libido", even though this term
was to undergo a significant change of meaning in the second
phase.

While the descriptions of these syndromes, written a century

ago, may sound relatively archaic, they are of importance in pro-
viding some indication of the sort of clinical conditions that Freud
had concerned himself with, and which provided the basis for his
psychological theories at that time. We have attempted in this
chapter to encompass the essentials of these theoretical formula-
tions within the "affect-trauma': frame of reference. It will be seen
in Parts I11 and IV, when the "topographical" frame of reference is
discussed, that Freud's theoretical viewpoint underwent a radical
change, even though the influence of the first phase on those that
succeeded it was profound.
 PART 11 1

Second phase:
the topographical
frame of reference
CHAPTER FOUR

The organization
of the mental apparatus

s we have seen, the first phase of psychoanalysis was

comparatively short, ending in 1897, and Freud's psycho-
logical theories during that phase can be encompassed
within what we have termed the "affect-trauma" frame of refer-
ence.
The psychoanalytic psychology of the second phase was
developed by Freud (together with a small number of colleagues)
over a much longer period of time, spanning the quarter of a cen-
tury from 1897to 1923.We pointed in Chapter 1to the tremendous
developments that took place during this phase. A wealth of im-
portant theoretical formulations emerged, along with a number of
case-reports, clinical observations and studies on psychoanalytic
technique. Freud's essential clinical constructs have been consid-
ered elsewhere (Sandler, Dare, & Holder, 1992); although we are
concerned here with Freud's general psychological theories, we
would emphasize the constant interaction in this phase, as had
occurred in the first phase, between Freud's clinical formulations
and his theoretical constructions. This interaction led to continual
theoretical modifications, and in providing a frame of reference for
58 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

the second phase we have ventured on a task that we have found

far from easy. In this presentation, we undoubtedly do violence to
a great many details of Freud's formulations. However, we are
convinced that the provision of a relatively simplified frame of
reference for the complicated developmentsof the second phase is
essential. This is all the more so because the concepts specific to the
second-phase "topographical" model were not entirely discarded
after the introduction of the structural model (Freud, 1923b) and
are still very much in current use. For this reason, this chapter
and the next five are devoted to the topographical frame of refer-
ence. These are followed in Part IV by a discussion of further
aspects and the limitations of Freud's topographical theory and
then in Part V by the way in which psychoanalysis developed
during the third phase.
The main theoretical propositions of the second phase were
first put forward by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), in
particular in the famous seventh chapter, which spelled out the
first full formulation of the "topography of the mind".' Of special
relevance to the theories of the second phase are Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905d);"Formulations on the Two Principles of
Mental Functioning" (1911b); "A Note on the Unconscious in Psy-
cho-Analysis" (1912g); the article "On Narcissism: An Introduc-
tion" (1914~);the whole series of papers on metapsychologyZ
(1915~)1915d, 1915e, 1917d [1915], 1917e [1915]); certain of the

The detailed study of "Chapter Seven" frequently finds a place early in

psychoanalytic training courses. In our view this chapter is not only difficult to
comprehend, but includes a number of propositions that are over-complicated
and superfluous in the light of later developments. This important chapter can,
we believe, be studied with most profit after the essentials of psychoanalytic
psychology have been mastered.
We would remind the reader that what we refer to as "psychoanalytic
psychology" has traditionally been called "metapsychology" (i.e. the theories
"beyond" psychology). The term metapsychology was coined by Freud in the
first phase when "psychology" referred to the study of conscious phenomena
only. It continues to be used in psychoanalytic writings, but as modem non-
psychoanalytic psychology is so much more than the study of conscious mental
experiences, the term "metapsychology" adds a somewhat archaic flavour to
psychoanalytic writings.
 THE MENTAL APPARATUS 59

Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-17); and Beyond the

Pleasure Principle (1920g).
We have previously mentioned the importance of Freud's self-
analysis and the analysis of his patients' dreams and his own in
fostering decisive changes in his views. These changes crystallized
towards the end of the century, leading to a shift of focus in
psychoanalytic thinking from the influence of external reality
(especially traumatic events) to the way in which the mental
apparatus deals with spontaneous inner urges and demands
and their manifold representatives. In the first phase, the patients'
"memories" of childhood seductions were, on the whole, thought
to be of real events, memories charged with the "energy" of affects
that were, in their turn, mainly seen as emotional responses to the
external events. With the introduction of the idea that many of such
"memories" of real events were in fact wish-fulfilments, the second
phase could be regarded as having begun.
From the clinical viewpoint the initiation of the second phase
involved the abandonment in 1897 of the hypothesis that adult
neuroses could be traced back to experiences of early sexual
seduction; this resulted in a massive shift of interest to the clinical
and theoretical importance of sexual wishes and wish-fulfilling
daydreams, which might or might not be within the patient's con-
scious awareness. Throughout the second phase the fundamental
function of the mental apparatus was seen as that of harnessing
the instinctual drives and the wishes that represented them (the
instinctual wishes). This "harnessing" normally took account of
external reality, gratification of the drives being allowed in dis-
guised form whenever possible. A good example of this is found in
the way Freud viewed sublimation, a process manifested in such
activities as public speaking or theatrical performances, which
could be regarded as expressions (and sources of gratification) of
unconscious exhibitionistic w i ~ h e s . ~

Freud took the term "sublimation"from chemistry, referring to a process

of purification. Freud's concept of sublimation involved the idea that the in-
stinctual energy powering the crude sexual wish was purified and expressed in
a socially acceptable and valued form.
60 S E C O N D PHASE: T H E T O P O G R A P H I C A L FRAME

All this represented a significant change. Emphasis now came

to be placed on the role of insinctual forces in the individual's
development and subsequent adaptation4.The forces of external
reality, although not entirely neglected, came to play a minor role
in this phase when compared to those arising from within? The
individual was seen to be, to a large degree, at the mercy of instinc-
tual impulses, at first thought to be largely libidinal (i.e. sexual).
These impulses, arising from the depths of the mental apparatus,
could not always be allowed direct expression after early child-
hood but, to a large extent, could only show themselves indirectly in
one or other surface manifestation.
Freud's concept of the instinctual drive is not easy to under-
stand. Freud himself referred to it as "somewhat obscure", but
"indispensable to us in psychology" (1915~~ p. 118).He commented
that the drive can be regarded "as a concept on the frontier be-
tween the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of
the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the
mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the individual for
work in consequence of its connection with the body" (1915~~ pp.
121-122, italics added).
According to Freud (1915~)~ the instinctual drive is character-
ized by its pressure, its aim, its object, and its source. These are best
described in Freud's own words:
By the pressure [Drang]of an instinct we understand its motor
factor," the amount of force or the measure of the demand for
work which it represents. . . . The aim [Ziel) of an instinct is in

The concept of adaptation is used here in a broad sense, i.e. as adaptation

to external reality as well as what might be called "intrapsychic" adaptation. It
is this latter aspect that was given particular importance during the second
phase, a period during which the individual's problems in coping with instinc-
tual drives were the major concern of psychoanalysts.
However, in "Formulationson the Two Principles of Mental Functioning"
(1911b) Freud made a formal distinction between the "pleasure principle",
which regulated the functioning of the instinctual drives, on the one hand, and
the "reality principle", on the other.
*Freud also saw the drives as quantities of "energy" that pressed for
"discharge".
 every instance satisfaction, which can only be obtained by
removing the state of stimulation at the source of the instinct.
. . . The object [Objekt] of an instinct is the thing in regard to
which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim.
It is what is most variable about an instinct and is not origi-
nally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in
consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction
possible. The object is not necessarily something extraneous: it
may equally well be a part of the subject's own body. It may be
changed any number of times in the course of the vicissitudes
which the instinct undergoes during its existence. . . . By the
source [Quelle] of an instinct is meant the somatic process
which occurs in an organ or part of the body and whose stimu-
lus is represented in mental life by an instinct. . . . Although
instincts are wholly determined by their origin in a somatic
source, in mental life we know them only by their aims. [1915c,
pp. 122-1231
The nature and development of the instinctual drives received
a great deal of attention during the second phase, in particular the
idea of phases of development in regard to childhood sexuality, as
well as the special problems relating to the role of aggression. All of
this deserves separate discussion, but the psychoanalytic models of
the mental apparatus can for our present purposes be considered
separately from the specific character of the individual instinctual
drive components.
Conflict was seen as coming about because of the existence of a
special set of drives that functioned in the interest of self-preserv-
ation (so-called "ego instincts" or "self-preservative drives"):
Opposition between ideas is only an expression of struggles
between the various instincts. From the point of view of our
attempted explanation, a quite specially important part is
played by the undeniable opposition between the instincts
which subserve sexuality, the attainment of sexual pleasure,
and those other instincts, which have as their aim the self-
preservation of the individual-the ego-instincts. [1910i, pp.
213-2141
Thus drives could arouse conflict, and the attempted solutions
to such conflicts could bring about compromise-formations. Through-
out the second phase such phenomena as dreams, daydreams,
62 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

symptoms, character traits, works of art, and other forms of behav-

iour and experience are regarded as compromises between the
instinctual wish and all the forces that opposed instinctual gratifi-
cation. A compromise-formation was regarded as representing a
disguised form of gratification of the instinctual wish, but at the
same time it also reflected the defence that had been mobilized
against the underlying instinctual wish. This conception was re-
garded as central to the development of certain forms of pathology.
For example, a fear of open places (agoraphobia) might be due to
unconscious sexual or aggressive wishes that have aroused conflict
and have been defended against by an unconsciously imposed self-
restriction. In the agoraphobic symptom the preoccupation with,
for instance, the fear of sexual assault may represent both a dis-
guised repetition of the unconscious wish and the defence against
it. Here the symptom is "ego-alien" or "ego-dystonic" (Freud,
1914d), in that it is consciously felt by the sufferer to be an un-
wanted and distressing affliction. Character traits, on the other
hand, were also understood as the outcome of conflict, but were
seen as "egosyntonic" (Freud, 1911c [1910])-i.e. they are not felt
by their possessor as alien, and certainly not as pathological. A
character trait reflecting a preoccupation with cleanliness may be
the product of a conflict over an instinctual wish to mess and
smear. The very preoccupation with the possibility of oneself or
others being messy and untidy provides an unconscious instinctual
gratification, while the defence against the instinctual wish is satis-
fied by the way the wish is characteristically dealt with. While a
tendency to cleanliness and orderliness is not at all pathological, it
can become a compulsion, in which case it would have to be con-
sidered to be a neurotic symptom.
Trauma was now seen in terms of the danger of being hurt,
rejected, or punished to an intolerable degree (in particular the
threat of castration or of loss of the parents' love) or in terms of the
individual being overwhelmed by instinctual drive excitation, rather
than by externally aroused excitation as in the first phase. In the
second phase both normal and pathological processes came to be
described in terms of internal psychological ("intrapsychic") adap-
tations to the pressure and "demands" of the drives. Processes such
as defence against the expression of crude instinctual wishes, their
 THE MENTAL APPARATUS 63

"censorship", transformation, and disguised gratification were

highhghted.
In presenting the topographicalframe of reference we shall attempt
to provide a schematic basis for comprehending the various hypo-
thetical systems and processes involved. The long second phase
was the time during which the many ways in which unconscious
instinctual wishes controlled behaviour were studied in extenso.
The translation of surface expressions back into unconscious
meanings and the detailed study of symbols and of the repetition
of the childhood past (especially the sexual life of the child) all
preoccupied psychoanalysts, both in the consulting-room and in
psychoanalytic studies outside it.

Topography

During the long second phase the mental apparatus was seen in
terms of one or other variant of the "topographical" model. This
model derives its name from Freud's attempts to describe the
"topography" of the mind, with emphasis on the psychological
interrelationships and the interaction of qualitatively different
strata of the apparatus. Freud put it as follows when he introduced
the notion of mental topography or "psychical locality" in The
Interpretation of Dreams:
I shall entirely disregard the fact that the mental apparatus
with which we are here concerned is also known to us in the
form of an anatomical preparation, and I shall carefully avoid
the temptation to determine psychical locality in any anatomi-
cal fashion. I shall remain upon psychological ground, and I
propose simply to follow the suggestion that we should pic-
ture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as
resembling a compound microscope or a photographic appa-
ratus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical
locality will correspond to a point inside the apparatus at
which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into
being. In the microscope and telescope, as we know, these
occur in part at ideal points, regions in which no tangible
64 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

component of the apparatus is situated. [1900a, p. 536, italics

added]
The principal reference point for the "topography" is the
psychological quality of consciousness. The names chosen for
the various parts of the mental apparatus indicate their relation-
ship to the surface, i.e. to consciousness. The three systems that are
involved are designated as the Conscious, Preconscious, and Un-
conscious systems (see Figure 4.1). Boundaries are thought to exist
between these systems, and before discussing the topographical
frame of reference it is worth commenting that the boundaries are
presented here as concepts useful for the sake of exposition (in-
deed, Freud regarded them in this light), and that they should not
be thought of as clear-cut at all times. At periods of relative mental
harmony or of "psychic equilibrium", the dividing lines must be
regarded as being blurred; it is only during periods of conflict that
the various systems can be thought of as acting as if they were
sharply defined and separate entities. For example, a wish to see a
rival killed may be tolerated by all three systems as long as the
rival is fit and well, but conflict may be aroused if the rival falls ill
(especially if he is also a loved member of the family), and the wish
may be relegated to the system Unconscious. For certain purposes
it may also be useful to consider the mental systems as being to
some extent on a continuum, the boundaries in the schematic pres-
entations serving the same purpose as the contour lines on a
map. The individual systems are discussed in detail in Chapters 5,
6, and 7.'

The need for simplificationis exemplified by the fact that in the model of
the mind put forward by Freud in 1900 he wrote of a system that receives
perceptions (the system Pcpt.). At a later point he introduced the notion of a
separate system in which consciousness arises (the system Cs.).It was only in
1915 that these two separate systems were regarded as one (the system Pcpt.-
Cs.).Freud also occasionallywrote of the Conscious and Preconscious as if they
were one system (e.g. in 1915e),but we will maintain a consistent distinction
between the two. Moreover, we will regard perceptual input as impinging on
the apparatus either through consciousness or outside it, and that it can affect,
directly or indirectly, any or all of the three major systems.
 The mental apparatus

I Sy~tem I sy~tml I EXTERNAL

I Preconscious I Conscious I
I I I I
I I 1 I
I I I I
I I I I
I I I I
I I I I
F I G U R E 4.1. The "systems" of the mental apparatus in topographical
relation to one another.

A comment on the use of the term "Unconscious"

At this point we would like to re-emphasize the fact that confusion
often arises because of the attribution of different meanings to the
term "unconscious". In this book, "Unconscious" (spelled with a
capital "U") is used to denote a system that is part of the mental
apparatus in the topographical frame of reference, and which is
thought of as functioning according to certain specific laws. Its
contents, as long as they remain in this system, always have the
quality of unconsciousness (or lack the quality of consciousness).
The system Preconscious has contents that also have the quality of
unconsciousness (i.e. they are, descriptively speaking, unconscious);
but these contents are, by definition, not at that particular moment
contents of the system Unconscious. The distinction between
what is, from the point of view of description, unconscious, and
the use of the term to refer to a specific system should always be
kept in mind. In general, the term "unconscious" used as a descrip-
66 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

The mental apparatus

I I
I System 1 system I system
I Unconscious I Preconscious I Conscious
I I I
I I I
I I I
SOMA I Contents are I Contents are I Contents are EXTERNAL
WORLD
dynemlcelly preconscious conscious
I unconscious I I
I I I
I I
I I
I I

Descriptively unconscious
mental content

FIGURE 4.2. The relation of the three systems in the topographical frame
of reference to the qualities of consciousness and unconsciousness.

tive adjective includes the contents of both the Unconscious a n d

Preconscious systems." This is indicated in Figure 4.2. An inordi-
nate amount of muddle has been introduced into psychoanalytic
writings and discussions by the failure to indicate (or even, in
some cases, t o appreciate) the sense in which the term is being
used.
-- -

Part (but only part) of the confusion surrounding the term "unconsdous"
IJ

comes from the fact that German nouns are always written with the first letter
capitalized. In translation the nouns referring to the Unconscious and Precon-
scious systems have sometimes been written as "the Unconscious" and "the
Preconsdous" and sometimes as "the unconsdous" and "the preconsaous".
We have adhered to the practice of using the capital letter when referring to the
system and not when the word is intended in a descriptive sense. Unfortu-
nately, the Standard Edition of Freud's works often uses "the unconscious"
when the system is being discussed.
A comment on the use of the term "Preconscious"
The term "preconscious" may give the impression that the contents
of the system Preconscious are somewhat less unconscious from
the point of view of their quality. This is incorrect. Descriptively
speaking, they are quite outside consciousness. However, the term
was introduced in the second phase to refer to contents that are,
descriptively speaking, unconscious, but were capable of becoming
conscious if attention was directed towards them. Thus, if one is
asked what one had for breakfast or where one was born, these
pieces of information were unconscious in the sense that one was
not thinking of them at the time, but they can normally be readily
recalled. In this sense they differ enormously from childhood
memories that had been subjected to repression and, because of
that, formed part of the Unconscious system and could not nor-
mally be recalled.
Early in the second phase (see Freud, 1900a) censorship was
thought to exist between the Unconscious and the Preconscious,
but the contents of the Preconscious were thought to be freely
accessible to consciousness. However, Freud simultaneously took
the view that there was a censorship between the Preconscious and
Conscious system^.^ The workings of the Unconscious and the
Preconscious can be regarded as vastly different. So, for example,
preconscious functioning may make use of formal modes of think-

Freud wrote of the excitations of the Preconscious being able to reach

consciousness after "observing certain rules . . .and perhaps only after passing
a fresh censorship" (1900a, p. 615). Earlier in the same work he had commented
on "the privilege enjoyed by the second agency [the Preconscious] . . . of per-
mitting thoughts to enter consciousness". He said, "Nothing, it would seem,
can reach consciousness from the first system [the Unconscious] without
passing the second agency; and the-second agency allows nothing to pass
without exercising its rights and making such modifications as it thinks fit in
the thought which is seeking admission to consciousness" (1900a, p. 144).This
presents an interesting contradiction in Freud's view of the Preconscious
system, because he also regarded the contents of that system as being freely
accessible to consciousness; and this contradiction was not resolved during the
second phase. In our exposition of the topographical frame of reference it will
be seen that we take account of the censorship between the Preconscious and
the Conscious, and regard it as of the highest importance, both theoretically
and dinically.
68 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

ing (secondary process), while the Unconscious, by definition, can-

not. Although contents that can be allowed into consciousness
without hindrance if attention is directed to them can be referred
to as being "preconscious", not all preconscious contents are fieely
accessible to consciousness; some may only be permitted to pass to
consciousness in a disguised form. Equally, they may be repressed
into the Unconscious before they gain entry into consciousness.In
this frame of reference we shall adhere to Freud's other formula-
tion (see 1916-17) that a "censor" exists between the Preconscious
and Conscious systems.

The interrelation of the mental systems

In presenting the topographical frame of reference we are prima-

rily concerned with the vicissitudes of the instinctual wish as it
makes its way (or attempts to do so) from the system Unconscious
to surface expression. A considerable degree of dynamic interac-
tion between and within the different systems is involved in this
movement. This dynamic interaction is illustrated later by means
of examples, but its importance has made it necessary to empha-
size the boundaries between the different systems.

Boundaries between sys terns

The notion of defence against "incompatible ideas" was put for-
ward in the first phase, and greatly elaborated in the second. This
development was intimately linked up with a view of the bounda-
ries between the different systems as having the function of censor-
ship. Essentially, the censorship is seen as operating to protect
consciousness from the awareness of those instinctual wishes that,
in direct or indirect form, would represent a threat if they were
permitted surface expression.1° This censoring takes place completely

lo The topographical viewpoint evolved in relation to the clinical method

of the second phase of psychoanalysis, and it is not difficult to see how this way
of considering mental functioning came into being. The patient's relatively
unguided "free associations" were assumed to reflect the emergence and
 THE MENTAL APPARATUS 69

outside consciousness. The scanning and scrutiny of instinctual

wishes and their derivatives involved in the censorship necessarily
presumes the existence of a form of "unconscious awareness" in the
Preconscious.
It is appropriate to make use of Freud's metaphorical descrip-
tion of the censoring processes:
.
Let us . . compare the system of the unconscious to a large
entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another
like separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall there
is a second, narrower, room-a kind of drawing-room--in
which consciousness . . . [also] resides. But on the threshold
between these two rooms a watchman performs his function:
he examines the different mental impulses, ads as a censor,
and will not admit them into the drawing-room if they dis-
please him. . . . It does not make much difference if the
watchman turns away a particular impulse at the threshold
itself or if he pushes it back across the threshold after it has
entered the drawing-room. . . . If they have already pushed
their way forward to the threshold and have been turned back
by the watchman, then they are inadmissible to consciousness;
we speak of them as repressed. But even the impulses which the
watchman has allowed to cross the threshold are not on that
account necessarily conscious as well; they can only become so
if they succeed in catching the eye of consciousness. We are
therefore justified in calling this second room the system of the
preconscious. [191617, pp. 295-2961
It is necessary to add that contents in the Preconscious not only
have to "catch the eye of consciousness" but also have to overcome
the second censorship operating between the Preconscious and
Conscious systems. Freud's metaphor brings in a most important,
but often forgotten, notion, developed during the second phase:
that repression not only occurs at the transition from the Uncon-
scious to the Preconscious system, but may equally well affect

transformation of inner instinctual urges in the passage from the depths to the
surface, and this assumption was then generalized to other aspects of behav-
iour and mental functioningvia the study of dreams, slips of the tongue, faulty
acts, symptom formation, artistic productions, etc. In the second phase, behav-
iour is in general regarded as predominantly motivated by instinctual wishes,
as modified by the censorship, and regarded as attempts at wish-fulfilment.
70 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

contents of the Preconscious itself, including derivatives of the

system Unconscious at some point in their development towards
surface expression. This point is of crucial importance for the un-
derstanding of the way in which Freud came to see the functioning
of the mental apparatus in the second phase. It is a point that has
been obscured and neglected in much of the relevant psychoana-
lytic literature, and it is partly because of this that we want to
emphasize it as strongly as possible here. Its implication is that
repression and the other mechanisms of defence do not constitute a
static boundary or dam at the border between the Unconscious and
Preconscious systems. Wishes arising in the Unconscious are re-
garded as passing through the Preconscious on their way to surface
expression, being transformed in the process of becoming "deriva-
tives" of the Unconscious. Such derivatives bear the stamp of pre-
conscious mental functioning (which we discuss in detail later), but
may be defended against at any point in their journey to the system
Conscious (or even after they have entered that system, as when a
conscious wish-fulfilling daydream is repressed) and may be rele-
gated to the deeper layers of the apparatus. In order to attain the
system Conscious (i.e. to achieve "discharge"), the derivative of the
wish from the Unconscious must be sufficiently disguised so as to
evade the censorships: we may thus assume the creation of succes-
sive derivatives of the instinctual wish until one is formed that
appears to be sufficiently innocuous to be allowed to proceed.
The point at which censorship actually occurs depends not only
on the content of the unconscious instinctual wish in question, but
also on the state of the various systems at any one time. Thus the
"level of censorship" may be less during states of sleep, inattention,
or intoxication than when the person is fully alert. Furthermore, we
should add that although a derivative of an instinctual wish may
be perfectly acceptable at some particular time in a person's life, at
other times or in other circumstances it may for one reason or
another have become less acceptable to the censor.
During the second phase the clinical manifestation of the func-
tioning of defence was seen as resistance during the course of psy-
choanalytic treatment. (In the next phase resistance was regarded
as having several additional sources.) Using the topographical
frame of reference, interpretation of resistance was seen as a fund-
amental psychoanalytic method for bringing into consciousness
 THE MENTAL APPARATUS 71

preconscious derivatives of the Unconscious, which were active

but were being prevented from entering the system Conscious.
These processes, involving a dynamic interaction between the sys-
tems, will, we hope, become clearer after the individual systems
have been described in Chapters 5 , 6 , and 7.
We would reiteratefor the point cannot be made too often-
that the descriptive term "unconscious" applies to both the
Unconscious system and the Preconscious system in the topo-
graphical frame of reference.
CHAPTER FIVE

The system
Unconscious

I
n our discussion of the topographical frame of reference
we considered Freud's division of the mental apparatus into
three systems, which varied in their "depth" within the mental
apparatus. While the interaction between the systems and the func-
tion of the "censorship" have been discussed, more detailed
consideration of the individual systems has been left to this and
subsequent chapters.

The system Unconscious

The contents of the Unconscious can be regarded as being com-

posed of unsatisfied instinctual wishes, which are the mental
representations of the drives. Broadly speaking, a differentiation
can be made between sexual and aggressive drives, although there
is a further subdivision in terms of so-called "component" or
"partial" drives, which have their origin at different stages of the
individual's development.
 Although the drives are regarded as having sources, pressures,
aims, and objects, it is necessary to make a distinction between
their biological and psychological aspects. As we have indicated,
the instinctual drives are psychological constructs, even though
they are regarded as being closely related to biological processes.
In Freud's descriptions throughout the second phase, these two
aspects are not clearly distinguished. Thus he postulated biological
sources, aims, and objects for the component instincts, although the
hypothetical pressure of the drive was essentially a psychological
construct. It is also essential to point out that although,from the
point of view of the observer, the infant may be satisfying its instinc-
tual drives in relation to an object (e.g. pleasurably sucking at its
mother's breast), it may have no psychological knowledge or
mental representation of the object from which its satisfaction is
derived. Indeed, it may, early in life, know little more than the
experience of the sequence of unpleasurable tension and pleasur-
able satiation. We mention this because of the widespread in-
fluence in psychoanalytic writings of the "psychologist's fallacy",
which results in the presumption that what the observer sees the
infant knows. William James put it: "The great snare of the psy-
chologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental
fact about which he is making his report" (1890, p. 196). Neverthe-
less, we can assume that from early in its development the infant
receives and retains impressions connected with drive tension and
gratification, and these impressions are regarded as being laid
down in the mental apparatus in the form of memoy traces.
The instinctual drive is conceptualized, from a quantitative
point of view, as a fluctuating quantity of energy that, having
reached a certain level of intensity, "seeks discharge".' In this con-
text the drive is spoken of as "satisfied" or "discharged" when it
is at a low level, and as "unsatisfied", in a state of "drive tension",
when its pressure is high. It is of some interest that Freud trans-

' Freud's idea of "psychicenergy"was consistent with nineteenth-century

energic concepts, especially those of the physical sciences and the neuro-
physiology of the time. The idea of the "discharge"of psychological energies
paralleled the notion of the "discharge"of nervous energy along the nervous
pathways. Although the concept of "discharge"subsequentlychanged in biol-
ogy, it has endured in psychoanalytic theory. It is certainly central to the way
74 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

ferred from the affect-trauma model of mental functioning the

concept of a "quantity of energy" pressing forward for "dis-
charge". Freud first considered the sexual drives almost exclu-
sively, and referred to their energy as "libido", but he never coined
a corresponding term for the energy of the aggressive drives (now
usually referred to as "aggressive energy"). Although Freud often
used the term "libido" to refer to instinctual energies in general,
our usage of "instinctual energy" includes both sexual and aggres-
sive energies as conceived in this frame of referen~e.~
A drive can be thought of as being "aroused" by stimuli from
within the individual or by stimulation from without. In this frame
of reference allowance must be made for both these sources of
increase in the pressure of a drive. With the arousal of a quantity of
drive energy, memory traces of previously satisfying experiences
are stimulated and are cathected3with drive energy.

in which the contents of the system Unconscious are seen as functioning in

the topographical frame of reference. In our view the notion of drive satis-
faction through a discharge of energy is now outdated and confuses many
important issues. How, for instance, can one obtain instinctual discharge
through indulging in a wishful daydream, which involves a minimum of
physical activity?
' It is also evident that there are a number of other problems C O M W ~ ~ ~
with these formulations. These arise in part from the historical fact that Freud
only gave aggression the status of an independent instinctual drive relatively
late in the second phase (Freud, 1920g). While the sexual component instincts
were linked by Freud (from 1905onwards) with erotogenic zones, links cannot
be made in the same way for the aggressive drives, although attempts have
been made to associate aggressive impulses with the use of certain body parts
and functions. The development of Freud's drive theories has been discussed
by a number of authors (e.g. Bibring, 1941; Compton, 1983a, 1983b).
The term cathexis is an unfortunate rendering of the original German
Besetzung, which means, and in our view should have been translated as,
"investment". However, it would appear that "cathexis" is here to stay. In
psychoanalytic writings the term "libidha1 cathexis" is often used to indicate
the investment of an object or an idea with any instinctual charge, but the term
"aggressive cathexis" is perfectly appropriate, although not found in Preud's
writings. The term "cathexis" is also used in psychoanalytic psychology in
relation to attention, although here the phrase "investment with attention
cathexis" is the appropriate one (in a model that assumes that the making of
something conscious implies investing it with a form of non-instinctual en-
ergy). The phrase "to cathect a love-object" may simply mean "to invest the
Instinctual wishes
The instinctual drives are hypothetical constructs and are
regarded as being represented in the Unconscious by instinctual
wishes. Indeed, the instinctual wish can be viewed as the basic unit
in the Unconscious. It has two components. The first is the instinc-
tual energic charge and the second the revived m m o y derived
from the memory trace or traces that have been cathected. If an
experience has previously provided instinctual gratification (drive
discharge), then the arousal of the instinctual drive is regarded
as activating the memory of the previous gratification. The re-
vived memory is referred to as the ideational content (the "idea"
component) of the wish. In the first instance, the wish arouses
unpleasurable tension in the apparatus and "presses forward" to-
wards activity and consciousness, so that the previously satisfying
experiences can be repeated and the satisfaction re-experienced. If
the wish were to be fulfilled, the unpleasure4of instinctual tension
would be replaced by pleasurable gratification.
In the Unconscious the instinctual wishes have a peremptory
quality-they seek pleasurable discharge and the reduction of
unpleasurable tension at all costs (i.e. they function according to
the pleasure principle or the pleasure-unpleasure principle). As we
have noted, the pressure for such direct and immediate gratifica-
tion, characteristic of the Unconscious, may (and very often will)
arouse conflict during the passage of the wish through the other
systems, and as a consequence the instinctual wish becomes sub-
jected to censorship and transformation. In the previous chapter
we have alluded to the way in which instinctual wishes can, as a
consequence, become transformed into derivatives ("derivatives of
the Unconscious") that may manage to pass the censorships and
provide instinctual gratification in a disguised form. The Uncon-

mental representationof the object with libido", but the phrase is often used to
denote a combination of instinctual cathexis and attention cathexis, i.e. mean-
ing "to be lovingly interested in" the person concerned. In the second phase,
"tolove" is identical with "to invest with libido".This subject will be dealt with
in greater detail in subsequent chapters.
'The German Lust is usually translated as "pleasure",and its opposite,
Unlust, as "unpleasure".Early translations rendered Unlust as "pain",but this
should be reserved for the translation of Schmerz, which Freud distinguished
from Unlust.
76 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

scious contains a central core of instinctual wishes related to the

most primitive forms of instinctual gratification. Linked with these
are further repressed derivatives of the basic infantile instinctual
wishes which, though acceptable to the censorship at one time in
the individual's life, were later subjected to repression because
they aroused unpleasurable conflict. So, to sum up: from the point
of view of the topographical frame of reference, the contents of the
Unconscious can be regarded as consisting essentially of infantile
sexual and aggressive wishes and their repressed derivatives,
which may be prevented by the censorship from finding direct
expression and discharge.
In the older child or adult, instinctual wishes containing primi-
tive sexual and aggressive content, as well as the constellation of
wishes involved in the well-known Oedipus complex, are normally
repressed and can only emerge in disguised form. In the course
of psychoanalytic treatment the development of various forms of
transference is regarded as representing derivatives of the Uncon-
scious. The same can be considered to be true for the dream, the
analysis of which was regarded, particularly in the early days of
psychoanalysis, as the "royal road to the Unconscious". We have
commented on the fact that, in the second phase of psychoanalysis,
the focus of the psychoanalyst's attention was on "the language of
the Unconscious", i.e. the forms in which the instinctual wishes
of the Unconscious found their expression in preconscious deriva-
tives or in surface behaviour and experience.
After a certain point in development has been reached, repres-
sion of an instinctual wish or its derivative (or even of innocuous
content unconsciously associated with an instinctual wish, as in
the temporary forgetting of a friend's name) can occur at any time.
Freud's book on The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b) gives
many examples of this process. The motive for repression is the
unpleasure aroused by conflict, or the anxiety associated with
the threat of an unpleasant experience of any sort. Thus, at all
times, the contents of the Unconscious are augmented by fresh
repressions. At the same time, the instinctual wishes of the Uncon-
scious constantly stimulate the formation of derivatives, which
find their way into the Preconscious and-if unacceptable aspects
are sufficiently disguised to escape the censorship--to conscious-
ness and motility.
 Earlier it was pointed out that in this frame of reference memo-
ries of earlier satisfying experiences are cathected by instinctual
drives in the formation of instinctual wishes. These satisfyingexpe-
riences need not have been real events, but can also have been
wish-fulfilling daydreams. Once these have been repressed they
are treated in the Unconscious as if they were memories of real events,
and when cathected by an instinctual drive become the content of
an instinctual wish. From the point of view of the topographical
frame of reference, we would say that in the first phase of psycho-
analysis Freud did not differentiate between the recall of a past
wish-fulfillingphantasy and the recovery of a repressed traumatic
memory. It was, of course, the realization by Freud of the irnpor-
tance of this distinction which led to the clinical and theoretical
developments of the second phase.
In this context the concepts of instinctual regression and fixa-
tion are of importance. Freud put it very aptly when he said that
"we propose to describe the lagging behind of a [sexual]part trend
at an earlier stage [of development] as afixation-a fixation, that is,
of the instinct . . . the portions which have proceeded further may
also easily return retrogressively to one of these earlier stages-
what we describe as a regression. . . . The stronger the fixations on
the path of development, the more readily will the function evade
external difficulties by regressing to the fixations. . . . Consider that,
if a people which is in movement has left strong detachments
behind at the stopping-places on its migration, it is likely that the
more advanced parties will be inclined to retreat to these stopping
places if they have been defeated or have come up against a supe-
rior enemy. But they will also be in the greater danger of being
defeated the more of their number they have left behind on their
migration" (1916-17, pp. 340-41)P

What we have described here is temporal regression, a "harkingback to

older psychical structures" (Freud, 1900a, p. 548). Freud also spoke of other
forms of regression, viz., topographical and formal. Topographical regression
relates, for example, to Freud's idea that revived memories can find their way
to the surface, as in dreams. Formal regression refers to the way in which
earlier form of expression may replace later ones. In practice we can use a
global concept of regression in the sense of a return to earlier modes of func-
tioning.
78 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

Mental functioning within the Unconscious

A number of processes were postulated by Freud as occurring
within this system. These "characteristic" modes of functioning
include the concept of primary process (which stands in marked
opposition to the secondary process, which we discuss in Chapter 6
in connection with the two other systems).
In order to present the concept of primary process it is neces-
sary to point out that Freud considered the energic cathexes of the
Unconscious to be "freely mobile". This meant that the instinctual
energy that invested memory traces (with the corresponding re-
vival of memories as part of the instinctual wish) was regarded as
"fluid" and could move from one idea or image to another. It was
regarded as being able to shift from the whole of an idea to one
of its parts; or the energy could be transferred from an idea to any
other ideational element that had been associated with it in
any way. Different ideational elements (e.g. two memories) could
become compounded, so that a composite entity is temporarily
formed. One might conceive of this as the instinctual energy
cathecting whole networks of ideas that are linked together by the
most primitive of associational ties.
It could be said that the arousal of drive tensions in the Uncon-
scious (as a consequence either of internal stimuli or of perception
of the external world) causes a cathexis of memory traces associ-
ated with past drive gratification. While it is the most important
memories of satisfaction that are initially cathected by drive energy
to give content to the instinctual wish, the energic element in the
wish can be regarded as relatively mobile and capable of being
transferred to other elements if obstacles exist in the path of direct
wish-fulfilment.This, in turn, can produce a whole host of alterna-
tive forms of the particular wish. In other words, if one could
hypothetically view the process from the side of the Unconscious,
derivatives are initially formed by means of the transferring of
mobile instinctual cathexis. (The processes involved in the forma-
tion of derivatives in the Preconscious are very different.)
The characteristics of primary process are therefore:

1. Displacement. The transferring of instinctual cathexis from one

mental content (idea, memory image, etc.) to another. This can
 result in a part substitutingfor the whole in the instinctual wish,
or vice versa. There is no logic in this displacement; no formal
rules are followed. One idea can stand for another in the Uncon-
scious if they share an associative link of any sort. Moreover,
instinctual cathexis may be transferred from element A to an
element C simply because A and C each have something in
common with B; and so on.
Condensation. The amalgamation of two or more ideational
elements cathected by the same charge of instinctual energy. In
a sense, the instinctual drive, if it has been linked with two
separate ideas or memories, can get "two for the price of one"
by the superimposition of one idea upon another.

Freud was of the view that the primary process mechanisms

can be discerned in the content of dreams and of slips of the
tongue. By getting the patient's associations to such material, it was
hoped that the analyst and patient would be able to trace the overt
material back to the underlying instinctual wish and to early
memories and conflicts.
Symbolization is sometimes included as a primary process
mechanism, but because symbolization and symbol formation
involve a highly complex process, we can refer to that aspect of
symbolization which is primary process in nature as being a
special case of displacement in which the part stands for the whole.
The instinctual wishes in the Unconscious derive largely from
the first few years of life, and the characteristics of mental function-
ing within the Unconscious more or less follow from the concepts
of freely mobile cathexis and primary process. These characteris-
tics can be listed as follows:
-
Timelessness. As Freud put it: "The processes [in the Uncon-
scious] . . . are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the
passage of time; they have no reference to time at all" (1915e, p.
187).As the concept of time is one that develops in the mind of
the child only after a period of time and is an aspect of the whole
of his cognitive development, it is linked, as we shall see, with
the more formal secondary-process functioning characteristic
of the Preconscious and Conscious systems.
80 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

Disregard of reality. Instinctual wishes are considered by Freud

to follow the pleasure principle. Here again, we see a sharp
difference in mode of functioning between the Unconscious on
the one hand and the Preconscious and Conscious on the other.
In the latter systems the "reality principle" obtains, whereas
in the Unconscious the pleasure principle and the pressure
towards the satisfaction of infantile instinctual wishes, however
unreasonable in the present, still persist.
3. Psychic reality. As far as the Unconscious is concerned, mem-
ories of real events and of imagined experiences are not dis-
tinguished. Abstract symbols are not recognized as abstract but
are treated as if they represented concrete reality."
4. Absence of contradiction. Inasmuch as the awareness of contra-
dictions involves a degree of formal thinking and judgement,
as far as the Unconscious is concerned, contradictory elements
are quite compatible and exist side by side. Freud cdmmented:
"When two wishful impulses whose aims must appear to us
incompatible become simultaneously active, the two impulses
do not diminish each other or cancel each other out" (1915e,
p. 186).Absence of contradiction in the Unconscious also exists
in the form of so-called identity of opposites. "Big" and "small"
are the same as far as the Unconscious is concerned, because of
the absence of negation (see below).
5. Absence of negation. Because the attachment of a "not" to an idea
reflects a formal thought process, acquired during the course
of development, negation does not exist in the Unconscious.
Negation is added in the other systems and usually points to
the opposite in the Unconscious (e.g. a patient having the
association "I remember being beaten by a man who was not at
all like my father" may be referring to a repressed memory of
being beaten by the father).
6. Words as "things". Whereas in the other two systems symbolic
and abstract representations (par excellence through words) are
extensively used, and the connection of the symbol with the

Vt has been pointed out (Sandler & Nagera, 1963) that the more-organized
part of the personality has to develop the capacity to disbelieve in order for
imaginative productions to be distinguished from real experiences.
 class of events to which it refers is retained, this is not so in the
Unconscious. With repression, the symbol is treated as if it were
a representation of a concrete thing. It has no abstract quality at
all. Thus the memory of something that was abstract might
appear in a concrete form in one or other derivative of the
Unconscious.This phenomenon has been thought to be particu-
larly evident in dreams and in some forms of schizophrenic
thought-disorder, Abstract words or sayings may be treated
absolutely literally and concretely.

These "properties" of the functioning of the Unconscious (not of

unconscious mental functioning in general) are reconstructions
from Freud's experiences in his analytic work, from his experiences
in searching for what lay beneath the surface communications and
behaviour of his patients. The analysis of dreams, in particular,
indicated to Freud that, in the formation of the dream, primary
process functioning could be discerned. In Freud's work on dreams
(1900a, 1917d [1915]), in what he called the psychopathology of
everyday life (1901b), on jokes (1905~)~ and in many other works,
the influence of the modes of functioning of the Unconscious
discussed above on "derivatives of the Unconscious" has been
elaborated.Their effect can also be reconstructed in "normal" phe-
nomena other than dreams. It could be said that the very modes of
functioning characteristic of the Unconscious are of tremendous
value to the instinctual wish in its movement through the Precon-
scious in search of gratification. They provide means whereby the
original content of the wish can be changed (e.g. through displace-
ment, equality of opposites, etc.) in such a way that the censorship
can be passed and the derivative of the wish can find overt expres-
sion.
The characteristics of the Preconscious and Conscious systems
stand in marked contrast to those of the Unconscious, and these are
discussed in Chapters 6 and 7.
CHAPTER SIX

The system
Preconscious

T
he origin of instinctual wishes and their primary process
transformations within the Unconscious were considered
in the previous chapter, and it was pointed out that the
wishes in the Unconscious can be regarded as thrusting forward
"blindly" towards overt expression in consciousness and behav-
iour, i.e. towards the Conscious. The so-called seething cauldron of
the Unconscious contains those sexual and aggressive wishes that
have been dominant in the first years of life and have subsequently
become unacceptable to the more organized parts of the apparatus,
i.e. to the systems Preconscious and Conscious. The instinctual
wishes of the Unconscious are constantly augmented through re-
pression of experiential contents connected with later derivatives
of childhood instinctual wishes, consigned to the Unconscious
because they were also, for one reason or another, judged to be
unacceptable.
In the topographical frame of reference the Preconscious lies
between the Unconscious and Conscious systems. While its major
functionsare to protect consciousness from being overwhelmed by
the forces of the Unconscious and to deal with these forces in such
 THE SYSTEM PRECONSCIOUS 83

a way that they can find expression so as to be acceptable to the

Conscious, it performs many other functions as well; some of these
are discussed in this chapter, together with certain important at-
tributes of the system.
It is worth recalling that the three systems can be regarded as
being separated by hypothetical boundaries, which have been
compared to the contour lines on a map. Moreover, the instinctual
wish,which can be regarded as the basic unit in the Unconscious,
is composed of hypothetical instinctual drive energy and images
that include ideational content representing the "wished-for" situ-
ation.' The latter includes what many analysts would now see as
some form of mental representation of the person's own self,
as well as of another person (or persons) who is the gratifying
"object" of the wish. In addition, there is an ideational representa-
tion of some act that would yield the type of instinctual gratifica-
tion sought. Thus a repressed sexual wish in the Unconscious
would involve content representing both the object of the wish and
the activity involved in relation to that object.
Before proceeding further, the notion of an "instinctual deriva-
tive" should be considered again. In general, a derivative of an
instinctual wish may be conscious or unconscious (in the descrip-
tive sense), depending on its topographical location in the appara-
tus. It is not the original instinctual wish, but a substitute for it,
one that can indirectly provide some degree of satisfaction of the
instinctual wish from which it has been derived and which, in
a sense, it conceals. Instinctual derivatives can take many forms,
including dreams, sublimatory activities, daydreams, neurotic
symptoms, hallucinations, parapraxes, forms of "acting out",
creative productions, play activities, transference manifestations,
and the like.
All the types of derivative listed above are given form in the
Preconscious and Conscious and should be distinguished from
primary process derivatives occurring within the Unconscious. In
the previous chapter we considered the way in which contents of

The images that form part of the instinctual wish were thought to arise in
the Unconscious as a consequence of the reinvestment of specific memory
traces by instinctual drive energy.
84 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

the Unconscious impinge on the Preconscious in the course of their

search for "discharge", i.e. for surface expression. The primary
process functioning characteristic of the Unconscious was seen as
entirely governed by the pleasure principle without regard to the
demands of reality. As has been mentioned, derivatives created in
the Preconscious and Conscious can be relegated to the Uncon-
scious by the process of repression. Once this has occurred, these
derivatives enter into the content of the instinctual wishes in the
Unconscious and are subject to primary process.

Characteristics and functions

of the Preconscious

The Preconscious is thought to develop gradually as a consequence

of the psychological interaction between instinctual wishes and
impulses, on the one hand, and the external world, on the other.
Although the system only comes into existence in the course of the
child's development, constitutional maturational elements are
thought to contribute to the mode of its evolution within a single
individual. Its functions and contents increase in number and com-
plexity as this development takes place, and it can be considered
to become increasingly differentiated from the Unconscious and
Conscious.
As we have pointed out, the contents of the Unconscious
consist of inactive or quiescent elements as well as repressed
unsatisfied instinctual wishes and their derivatives which are
active (i.e. "cathected" by instinctual drive energy). Any of these
elements may at any moment be stimulated by the internal pres-
sures of drive demands or by the impingement of the external
world. Thus, for example, primitive sexual wishes may be aroused
by sexual tension or by the sight of an attractive sexual object in the
external world. Even though wishes in the Unconscious may be
extremely active, the subject is not aware of them unless they gain
access to consciousness. If the wishes succeed in becoming con-
scious, this is usually in a modified form. The area of the mental
apparatus in which instinctual wishes are examined, modified,
permitted to proceed, or turned back is that of the Preconscious, a
system that is, descriptively speaking, unconscious.2
In contrast to the contents of the Unconscious, preconscious
contents include many diverse elements. In the first place there are
those primary process derivatives of the instinctual wishes which
are pressing forward for discharge and, by reason of their primary
process transformation, have evaded the first level of censorship
and have entered the Preconscious. It will be remembered that
primary processes in the Unconscious, particularly displacement
and condensation, allow constant and fluid changes in the form
of the instinctual wish, and if an appropriate primary process
transformation of the original instinctual wish happens to occur,
the wish, in its new form, is allowed by the censorship to enter the
Preconscious, although it may later be subjected to further modifi-
cation or repression. Secondly, the contents of the Preconscious
include mental representations that have been formed as a result of
present and past interaction with the external world (as perceptu-
ally experienced via the various sensory modalities). Thirdly, we
must include the products of preconscious imaginative (i.e. phan-
tasy) and cognitive activity.
In other words, the Preconscious and its contents arise as a
consequence of influences from two sides: from the depths of
the mental apparatus (the Unconscious) and from its s u r f a ~ eIn.~

It is remarkable how often, even when specifically utilizing the topo-

graphical model, psychoanalysts underestimate or even ignore the major role
of the Preconscious, and speak or write as if there were only two systems-i.e.
the Unconscious and the Conscious. This is a consequence of the historical
confusion between the system Unconscious and the descriptiveuse of "uncon-
scious".
Although the Preconscious is regarded as being located between the Un-
conscious and Conscious, work on subliminal perception has suggested that
conscious awareness of a stimulus from the external world is not a necessary
precondition for mental registration. Freud seems to have been aware of this
problem during the second phase, as can be judged by his indecision about
whether to postulate a perceptual system as distinct from the Conscious or
whether to regard them as one and the same system (thePerceptual-Conscious).
Problems of this sort contributed to the growing need, towards the end of
the second phase, to develop a different model of the mental apparatus, i.e. the
structuralmodel.
86 S E C O N D PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

addition, new ideational contents are constantly being formed

within the Preconscious itself. These include newly constructed
thoughts, wishes, and unconscious wish-fulfilling daydreams.
New derivatives of the instinctual drives, or further modifications
and elaborations of previous derivatives (not considered accept-
able to consciousness), are elaborated in the Preconscious. In the
construction of these "new products" the mode of functioning and
the "rules" followed are vastly different from those that can be
regarded as operating in the Unconscious. We discuss these later in
the chapter in reference to secondary process functioning:
In the work of the Preconscious, a great deal of integration
and synthesis occurs. There is a continuous interaction between
the instinctual wishes and their derivatives on the one hand,
and mental contents (in the form of present percepts and ideas
and memories of past experiences and thoughts) that are located in
the Preconscious, on the other. The "necessities", "demands", and
"limitations" imposed by the real external world (as it has been
perceived by the person) are taken into account. In doing this, the
Preconscious may make use of its capacity to delay and control the
peremptory instinctual wishes arising from the Unconscious that
have penetrated into the Preconscious. This implies that the Precon-
scious has the capacity to examine and scrutinize its own contents
without these having to enter the Conscious.
Much of the activity of the Preconscious can be subsumed un-
der the heading of thinking, and a substantial amount of problem-
solving and decision-making is accomplished within the system.
Such decision-makingcan range from the "automatic" adjustments
while driving a motor-car (in response to traffic signals and to
the behaviour of other drivers) to highly sophisticated creative
work; Henri Poincare commented on the latter a long time ago:

' It should be understood that in relation to "mental content", "ideas",

"images","memories",and the "content of imagination and perception",we
are referring to products of the activity of the perceptual apparatus and the
nervous system and not to ideas that have a separate and autonomous exist-
ence in themselves; and amongst "ideas" we include forms of experiential
content arising from any of the sensory modalities. We take the view that
"mind" is a function of the brain.
 Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination,
a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of
this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to
me incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other
cases. . . . Often when one works at a hard question, nothing
good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest
. . . it is more probable that this rest has been filled out with
unconscious work and that the result of this work has after-
wards revealed itself. [Poincar6,1908, p. 381
The Preconscious can function as it does because it has avail-
able to it a mass of memories of past experiences, memories that
have remained relatively independent of the influence of instinc-
tual wishes and their derivatives. This is not to say that artistic or
scientific productions are always free of the influence of uncon-
scious instinctual wishes; indeed, they often represent concealed
satisfactions of such impulses.
It must be emphasized that even the most reality-orientated
habits and skills, normally functioning smoothly under the control
of the Preconscious, can be disturbed by the influence of drive
derivatives. If, for one reason or another, they become involved
with a drive derivative, they may in turn be defended against in
their role as new drive representatives. The result may be a patho-
logical disturbance or inhibition of an otherwise perfectly normal
function. From being conflict-free they become drawn into conflict
through their connection with unwanted or threatening instinctual
wishes.
Many of the preconscious elaborations of relatively crude in-
stinctual wishes are represented in the Preconscious by thoughts
(regarded by Freud as "trial actions"). They include both reality-
orientated and logical thoughts and the special variety of wish-ful-
filling thought-constructions referred to as unconscious phantasies,
and combinations of both of these. (Freud, 1921b, distinguished in
this connection between "freely wandering phantastic thinking"
and thoughts as "intentionally directed reflection".) Like dreams,
phantasies are considered to be attempts to imagine situations that
would indirectly fulfil the instinctual wishes. Again, like dreams,
these phantasies draw upon memories of real events and knowl-
edge of the external world to clothe and elaborate the underlying
88 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

instinctual It is important to note that the Preconscious is

regarded as being able to make use of verbal symbolism. If the un-
conscious phantasy formed in the Preconscious is permitted to
reach the Conscious (either directly or in a disguised form), the
result may be a conscious phantasy (daydream). However, it may
(and frequently does) also take the form of other derivative activi-
ties (artistic works, symptoms, delusions, sublimations, etc.). Even
when phantasies remain active in the Preconscious without reach-
ing awareness, they can influence perception, action, and attitudes
profoundly.
Whereas the Unconscious is regarded as following the pleasure
principle, the Preconscious is influenced by what is known as the
reality principle. This refers to the taking into account the realities of
the external world (as it is known to the person) in assessing the
consequences of his actions. Freud referred to the reality principle
as a "modification" of the pleasure principle (1911b). Immediate
gratification of instinctual wishes or their derivatives is delayed or

The concept of unconscious phantasy is one with a long history in psy-

choanalytic thinking, in the course of which a number of different meanings
have accrued to the term. It may refer to wish-fulfilling daydreams in the
Preconscious, but it may equally refer to phantasies that were once either
conscious or preconscious but were subsequently repressed into the Uncon-
scious. Such phantasies in the Unconscious become, following repression, the
content of instinctual wishes, as they are, strictly speaking, no longer phan-
tasies (Sandier & Nagera, 1963). In Kleinian usage, all unconscious mental
content can be regarded as unconscious phantasy. In regard to this latter usage,
Susan Isaacs wrote: "Phantasy is (in the first instance) the mental corollary, the
psychic representative, of instinct. There is no impulse, no instindual urge or
response which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy. . . . A phantasy
represents the particular content of the urges or feelings (for example, wishes,
fears, anxieties, triumphs, love or sorrow) dominating the mind at the mo-
ment" (1948, pp. 81-82). This radical extension of the notion of phantasy is
quite different from Freud's formulation, which distinguishes, for example,
between wishes and wish-fulfilling phantasies.
Although the spelling "phantasy" was introduced in order to distinguish
unconscious phantasy from daydreaming ("fantasy"), "phantasy" is now gen-
erally used in Britain to include both conscious and unconscious forms. In the
United States the spelling "fantasy" tends to be used for both forms. We have
used the " p h spelling throughout, indicating when we refer to conscious
daydreams and when to (descriptively)unconscious phantasy.
 THE SYSTEM PRECONSCIOUS 89

abandoned if this threatens the self-preservativeneeds of the indi-

vidual or his moral and ethical princip1es.l The reality principle
plays a major part in the operation of the "second censorship"
between the Preconscious and the Conscious, but it can be con-
sidered to be a dominant "principle" in the functioning of the
Preconscious as a whole; however, the pleasure principle (which is
entirely dominant in the Unconscious) also enters into preconscious
functioning,although in a relatively subordinate role. It should be
emphasized that although the Preconscious can be regarded, in one
sense,as "set against" the Unconscious, it also functions to permit
instinctual wishes to gain access to consciousness and to motility
whenever possible, provided that consciousness is protected from
too great a quantity of pain or unpleasure. Some instinctual wishes
are permitted to pass the censorship and to find "discharge" with-
out any hindrance, while others are modified so that they are
acceptab1ei.e. as far as consciousness is concerned their gratifica-
tion does not cause conflict with the individual's self-preservative
interests, with his moral and ethical standards, or with his concern
for the important persons in his life (present or past). These modi-
fications can be considered to be compromise-formations.

Secondary process functioning

We earlier characterized the mental processes occurring in the
Unconscious as being subject to primary process functioning.
Ideas, memories, images, and repressed phantasy content are
treated as if they were the same. Primary process was described as
being a consequence of the free mobility of instinctual energies and
the absence, in the Unconscious, of logic, of notions of time, of
opposites, of contradictions and negation; furthermore, there is a
disregard of reality, and words are treated as concrete "things"
rather than as symbols.
In contrast to this, the Preconscious is said to function predomi-
nantly according to the secondary process, which is, developmentally

m e inadequacy of the reality principle as an explanatoryconcept for such

a variety of functions constituted a severe limitation on the topographical
model (see Chapter 11 for a discussion of the limitations of the model).
90 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

speaking, the outcome of the influence of the external world on the

mental apparatus. This impingement brings about such character-
istics as the notion of causality, logic, a sense of time, and an
intolerance of ambiguity and contradictory elements. Most impor-
tant, in the course of development, the Preconscious becomes,
together with the Conscious, that part of the mental apparatus in
which language can be used as an efficient tool for the manipula-
tion of mental content. The acquisition of verbal symbols for things
and for abstract ideas goes parallel with the differentiation be-
tween the Unconscious and Preconscious. Words can be used to
harness and to attenuate the force of instinctual wishes.
These processes were considered by Freud in terms of the
hypothetical energies involved. In the Unconscious, instinctual
energy is regarded as "freeJ' and "mobile", and in primary process
functioning the whole quota of energy with which an ideational
element is cathected may be displaced to some other element. In
the Preconscious, however, the harnessing of the instinctual energy
occurs by means of what Freud called the binding of energy, and
secondary processes (such as logical and reasonable thinking) are
characterized by the displacement of only small quantities of en-
ergy from one mental content to another, in a "formal" fashion. In
Freud's words:
I therefore postulate that for the sake of efficiency the second
system [the Preconscious] succeeds in retaining the major part
of its cathexes of energy in a state of quiescence and in employ-
ing only a small part on displacement. . . . the activity of . . .
[the system Unconscious] is directed towards securing the free
discharge of the quantities of excitation, while the . . . [Precon-
scious] system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it,
succeeds in inhibiting this discharge and in transforming the
cathexis into a quiescent one, no doubt with a simultaneous
raising of its level. . . . When once the second system has
concluded its exploratory thought-activity, it releases the in-
hibition and damming-up of the excitations and allows them
to discharge themselves in movement. [1900a, pp. 599-6001
Some of the functions and capacities of the Preconscious can be
summarized briefly as follows (not necessarily in order of impor-
tance):
 THE SYSTEM PRECONSCIOUS 91

1. The unconscious scanning of ideational input and of feeling states.

Preconscious (descriptively speaking, unconscious) scanning
is vital for the process of "censorship" and occurs in regard to
mental content arising from any source-be it the ideational
content of instinctual wishes, revived memories of the past, or
current perceptual content-before it is allowed access to con-
~ciousness.~
2. The censoring of instinctual wishes and their derivatives. While this
was described as occurring either at the hypothetical frontier
between the Preconscious and the Unconscious on the one
hand, and the Preconscious and the Conscious on the other,
censorship should be regarded as a function of the Preconscious
as a whole. Moreover, it would seem reasonable to take the
view, in this frame of reference, that it can occur at any point
on the continuum from the depths to the surface of the Pre-
conscious. Derivatives of the Unconscious may be censored
(defended against) at any point at which they produce con-
flict above a certain intensity in the Preconscious. It should be
understood that "censoring" is not only a process of blotting
out, debarring, or deleting from the Preconscious; from the
point of view of this system, it may also involve the active
modification of threatening content, so that it can be given a
new and more acceptable form. It involves "rewriting" as well
as "blue-pencilling".
3. The laying down of organized memory systems. "Memory" in re-
gard to the Unconscious can be regarded as being based on
memory traces that can be cathected by instinctual energy,
giving rise to the ideational content of instinctual wishes. The
"memories" of the Unconscious are linked together by simple
association and have no formal organization. In contrast, the

The latter point raises a difficult issue in this frame of reference. While, on
the one hand, perceptual content can be regarded as being directly aroused
in the Conscious, on the other there is no doubt that it is affected by the Pre-
conscious before conscious awareness occurs. Freud made several attempts to
deal with this problem, which could only be solved with the introduction of the
structural theory, in which the concepts of unconscious ego functioning and of
consciousness as a "sense-organ of the ego" are employed.
92 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

organized memory system of the Preconscious is constructed in

such a way that memories of the past can, within certain limits,
be sought for, recognized, retrieved, and orientated. This would
imply a sort of "filing system" that allows for the recognition
and recall of "appropriate" memories for such processes as
thinking, problem-solving, phantasying, orientation of self in
time and space, and so forth.
4. The testing of reality. This capacity, developing under the
dominance of the reality principle, enables a distinction to be
made between what is "unreal" (e.g. phantasies) and percep-
tual representations of something real in the external world.
(The term "external world", in its relation to the mental appa-
ratus includes the person's own body.) The capacity to distin-
guish between what is "real" and what is "unreal" ("conjured
up" in imagination, memory or thought, etc.) is a function of
development and was thought by Freud to be non-existent very
early in life, when real wish-fulfilment and hallucinated wish-
fulfilment are not distinguished. The content of nocturnal
dreams is not normally subjected to reality testing during dream-
ing, but daydreaming, on the other hand, carries with it the
stamp of unreality (Sandler & Nagera, 1963).Although all these
activities are described as if they involve consciousness, it is
assumed that they can occur in the Preconscious as well (i.e.can
be descriptively unconscious).
5. The binding of psychic energyewThe binding of mental energy is
regarded as a precondition for secondary process functioning
in that the latter involves the manipulation of small quantities
of energy. It implies the capacity in the Preconscious to inhibit
and control large quantities of instinctual energy. By means of
such binding of energy, contents from the Unconscious can be
handled in the Preconscious, and the result of the energic bind-
ing processes is that the imperative quality of the wishes de-
rived from the instinctual drives is diminished. This diminution
may be temporary, representing a "holding" of the drive en-

The psychoanalytic psychology of energic "binding"is complicated, ab-

stract, and, in our view, theoretically relatively unnecessary (see Gill, 1963;
Holt, 1962). We give what we believe to be the minimum account for presenting
this frame of reference.
 ergy cathecting the instinctual wishes or their derivatives,
while the Preconscious attempts to find a solution to the conflict
that the peremptory instinctual wishes may arouse. This con-
flict-solving functioninvolves secondary process, i.e. the man-
ipulation of small "sample" quantities of energy in thought or
phantasy. Of course, if no other solution can be found, repres-
sion of the instinctual wish may be the outcome. Bound energy
is also used in the construction of enduring mental organiza-
tions (such as those related to the organization of memory and
thought) within the Preconscious.
6. Control of access to consciousness and action. Such access is de-
pendent on the assessment and modification of any mental
content pressing forward through the Preconscious towards
"discharge" (in particular those contents that have come to
represent instinctual wishes or their derivatives). In this sense
the Preconscious functions to protect consciousnessfrom being
overwhelmed by unpleasant experiences and to prevent the
individual from acting in a way that is a potential source of
danger to his life, his reputation, his self-esteem, his moral
value system, and so forth.
7. Control over the development of afects. While the generation of
affects is regarded as a consequence of repression (the energy of
the repressed instinctual wish being capable of being trans-
formed into an affect), the Preconscious can prevent the devel-
opment of affects and their access to consciousness.By means of
so-called successful repression, which includes the repression
of the instinctual energy in the wish, the Preconscious is
thought to be able to prevent the generation of affect, although
its powers in this respect are less secure than in regard to the
control of access to motility. This is in part due to the assump-
tion, in this frame of reference, that instinctual drive energy
connected with repressed ideas may be converted into an~iety.~

In the second phase, affects were seen more or less entirely as drive
dmmolltives.Freud's well-known "first theory of anxiety" postulated that
anxiety represented a transformation of the instinctual drive energy of re-
pressed contents. The second theory of anxiety was put forward inlnhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d (19251) and is radically different in nature. This
94 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

8. The use of defence mechanisms. Apart from repression, the Pre-

conscious may make use of other defences (e.g. projection,
rationalization) in order to deal with conflict by modifying the
content of the instinctual wish. In contrast to repression proper,
which relegates the instinctual wish or its derivative to the
Unconscious, there are certain other defence mechanisms that
allow instinctual derivatives to proceed on their path to con-
sciousness in an altered form.1° Thus, for example, an uncon-
scious aggressive wish to attack someone may be transformed
by projection into a belief or anxiety that one may be attacked
by another person.
9. The construction of imaginative products. The Preconscious may
permit otherwise unacceptable derivatives of the Unconscious
to reach consciousness by constructing wish-fulfilling phan-
tasies in the form of "imaginative" or "creative" productions.
When such products reach the Conscious they have an appro-
priate "label" (e.g. of "daydream") attached to them, so that
they are not confused with the perception of reality. Similarly,

introduced the concept of "signal" anxiety, arising within the ego, where it was
seen as the main motive for defensive action. Thus in the first theory the view
was that defence leads to anxiety, while in the second theory it was that anxiety
leads to defence. It follows from Freud's second theory of anxiety that affects
can be regarded as responses of the (structural) ego rather than being drive
derivatives. The role of affects as regulators of interaction between the baby
and the caretaker has been intensively discussed in recent years (see Stem,
1985,1995).
lUThe role of rationalization as a preconscious process has been under-
estimated in the psychoanalytic literature. While rationalizations may be con-
scious attempts at self-justification (for a previous, current, or contemplated act
or attitude), rationalization occurs actively in the Preconscious as a means
of dealing with conflict by the formation of a further derivative in which the
individual feels righteous and justified. A striking example of the way in
which this occurs is when a subject is given a post-hypnotic suggestion to
perform an irrational act and, after emerging from the hypnotic state, produces
a justification for the performance of that act. That such rationalization occurs
preconsciously is shown by his own conscious belief in the validity of the
rationalization he has constructed. To paraphrase Freud, it is as if the rider may
believe that he is in charge of the horse, but is actually being taken where the
horse wants to go.
 instinctual wish-fulfilments may be permitted in the produc-
tion of works of art, storytelling,and so on, whereas they would
not otherwisebe allowed access to motility or to consciousness.
10. Symptom-formation. If repression of an instinctual wish or its
derivativecannot successfully be carried out, and if it cannot be
permitted expression in any other form, the Preconscious may
construct a compromise formation in the form of a neurotic
symptom. Such symptoms are felt by the Conscious to be alien
intrusions over which the individual feels he has no control.
CHAPTER SEVEN

The system
Conscious

I
n the topographical frame of reference the Conscious is re-
garded as the system on the surface of the mental apparatus.
Nevertheless, it has depth and is bounded by the relatively
deeper Preconscious, with which it shares a great number of
characteristics (e.g. secondary process, reality-testing, etc.). For the
purpose of-this presentation the perceptual apparatuses can be
regarded as representing the surface boundary of the Conscious,
open to the reception of impressions arising from sources external
to the mental apparatus, i.e. from stimuli from both the external
world and one's own body (kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, visceral,
etc.).'
We have stressed the point that the Unconscious and Pre-
conscious are descriptively unconscious.The conscious, on the other
hand, is that part of the mental apparatus within which the quality

In Chapter 6 (fn.3), reference was made to the difficulty inherent in this

frame of reference in regard to subliminal perception.There can be little doubt
that the process of "perception-work" (Sandler, 1960) which precedes con-
scious awareness must be allocated to the Preconscious. However, for our
of consciousness becomes attached to mental contents. Descrip-
tively speaking, all its contents (ideas, feelings, etc.) are conscious.
However, it is clear that at any one time only a very limited range
of contents in the Conscious can be the focus of conscious attention.
There are also different qualities of consciousness, ranging from
that of vivid perception of external events to fleeting daydream
thoughts "at the back of one's mind". Normally, the greatest de-
gree of vividness is attached to perceptions arising from sources
external to the mental apparatus (i.e. experienced by the most
superficial part of the Conscious), but this is not always the case,
as for example in hallucinations and nocturnal dreams. Similarly,
contents arising from within the apparatus are thought of as
entering the Conscious at its deeper boundary (e.g. daydream
thoughts and other ideas). It is assumed that stimuli external to the
apparatus have to overcome a certain threshold (the stimulus
barrier) before giving rise to conscious experience (see Figure 7.1).
The notion of attention is a very important one in considering
the functioning of this system. In brief, the Conscious contains
those contents entering from the side of the Preconscious or those
experiences from the external world or the body that are receiving
some degree of attention at any one time. When conscious attention
is completely removed from such contents, they can be regarded as
becoming preconscious, i.e. have become part of the contents of the
Preconscio~s.~

present purposes-i.e. an exposition of the topographical frame of reference-

it will be assumed, except where otherwise indicated, that the most superficial
surface of the system Conscious is that which receives perceptual content from
the sense-organs. The notion, held by Freud at one time during the second
phase, of the system Conscious as being separate from the perceptual system
will not be pursued, nor will the vicissitudes of the relationship between the
two and their eventual amalgamation into the one system, the Perceptual-
Conscious, be taken into account.
Investment with attention is not the same as consciousness. Preconscious
attention can be paid to certain types of experience without the person being
aware of this at the time. In addition, the exercise of repression may force
conscious content out of consciousness.This statement illustrates a major prob-
lem in regard to Freud's view of the Preconscious. On the one hand, those
contents of consciousness from which attention has been withdrawn can be
regarded as receding into the Preconscious. When needed they can readily
98 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

The mental apparatus

I I I
I system I system I system
I Unconscious I Preconscious I Conscious
I I I
I I .P1
c
I I
SOMA I Contents deriving from KJ0 l
the Unconscious system "
I and the Preconscious system I
I > !I
I I $1
I I I
I I I

FIGURE 7.1. Diagram illustrating, in the topographical frame of refer-

ence, the way in which contents arising from the external world have to
overcome the stimulus barrier to enter consciousness. Those contents
arising from within the mental apparatus have to pass the second cen-
sorship and enter the Conscious from its "deeper" end.

The contents of the Conscious have something of a "fleeting"

quality about them, despite the considerable intensity with which
they may be experienced. In order to survive, the individual,
whilst awake, has to pay constant attention to new perceptual
experiences, or to changes inperceptual input, although the quality

be recalled. On the other hand, Freud postulated a censorship, a barrier created

by repression, that prevented contents of the Preconscious from having ready
access to the Conscious. The paradox can be resolved by postulating that the
censorship between the Conscious and Preconsciousallows certain contents to
enter consciousnessreadily but exerts a repressive force against others that, for
one reason or another, have become linked with conflict. It functions from the
side of the Preconscious somewhat like a semipermeable membrane guarding
consciousness.
 THE SYSTEM CONSCIOUS 99

and intensity of the attention may vary. He may be carefully scru-

tinizing his environment, or be "lost in thought".
In line with the importance given to ideas of mental "energy",
attention is considered to be "an investment with attention
cathexis", i.e. an investment of an experiential content with a
charge of energy. This is not the freely mobile instinctual energy of
the Unconscious, nor the "bound" energy described in regard to
the Preconscious, but a special "mobile" and "neutral" energy,
normally free from sexual and aggressive qualities, which is at the
disposal of the Preconscious and Conscious. In Freud's words:
"The system [Preconscious] not merely bars access to conscious-
ness, it also controls access to the power of voluntary movement
and has at its disposal for distribution a mobile cathectic energy,
a part of which is familiar to us in the form of attention"(1900a1
p. 605).
In describing the differences between conscious and uncon-
scious processes, Freud (1925a [1924]) characterized the nature of
the processes involved by drawing an analogy with a particular
type of toy for children, known at that time as the mystic writing-
pad. This exists in a similar form today. It is a pad covered with
a clear celluloid or plastic surface backed by a block of wax (or
a piece of board coated with wax or similar substance). Using
a stylus, the pad can be drawn or written upon. The drawing or
writing can be made to disappear by separating the clear surface
from the underlying wax, and the pad immediately becomes clear
and ready to be used again. Freud commented: "But it is easy to
discover that the permanent trace of what was written is retained
upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights" (1925a
[1924], p. 230). The wax slab is likened to that part of the apparatus
which retains impressions outside consciousness, while the clear
surface corresponds to the Conscious.
It is clear from so-called "automatic" actions-i.e. slips of the
tongue and other "faulty acts" (parapraxes)-that there can be
motor expression of instinctual wishes (or their derivatives) that
bypass the Conscious system. We have noted previously that many
well-learnt skills achieve a high degree of autonomy and can be
performed without the need for conscious attention, even though
such attention is necessary while the skill is being acquired.
Normally, however, the Conscious is directly involved in pur-
100 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

posive action, including the obtaining of direct or indirect instinc-

tual drive satisfaction. Imaginative contents can be fully conscious
alongside a knowledge that they are not real, and, in this way,
quite unbridled instinctual wish derivatives can enter the Con-
scious in the form of daydreams; however, because of the reality
principle such derivatives may not be permitted to find discharge
in motor action. The tendency of instinctual wish derivatives to be
allowed into the Conscious as phantasies or daydreams is intensi-
fied by the prolonged absence of actual gratification.
We have not dwelt on the Conscious in detail, because, apart
from a few qualities (notably the existence of consciousness), in
Freud's view it shares many of the characteristics of the Precon-
scious (but not all--e.g. the mechanisms of defence function pre-
consciously). As in the Preconscious, the reality principle and
reality-testing operate in the Conscious, where they are more in-
fluential than in the Preconscious. Similarly, we find secondary
process functioning and occasional primary process manifesta-
tions.
In describing the topographical frame of reference, we have
presented the mental apparatus as if it were composed of three
separate compartments-the Unconscious, the Preconscious, and
the Conscious. While this is useful for purposes of exposition and
presentation, it is valuable to regard the topographical schema as
being, to a certain degree, a continuum. We can see the division
between what is conscious and what is unconscious as being a
matter of degree. Furthermore, the censorship can be regarded as
operating over the whole range of the Preconscious, more stringent
at its superficies and relatively lax at its depths. Similarly, there
would appear to be a case for regarding the relative dominance
of secondary process over primary process functioning as being
greatest towards the surface of the apparatus, least in the deep
stratum of the Preconscious, and absent in the Unconscious.
CHAPTER EIGHT

Transference

w e have attempted to describe in some detail the way

in which Freud's theories during the second phase of
psychoanalysis can be organized into a topographical
frame of reference. In view of its complexity we are supplementing
the essentially theoretical accounts by more detailed descriptions
of the way the apparatus functions. This chapter considers some
aspects of the clinical phenomenon of transference as it can be
understood within the topographical frame of reference.
The concept of transference was introduced by Freud during
the first phase, in Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1895d),but it received
its most extensive and coherent formulation in the second phase of
psychoanalysis, 1897-1923. There is an intimate lin!~between the
important clinical concept of transference and the topographical
model as it was elaborated and modified during this phase. Trans-
ference is a concept whose range of use and span of meaning
continues to represent a central aspect of the psychoanalytic theory
of the therapeutic process in particular, and of the psychoanalytic
psychology of interpersonal relationships in general.
102 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

It is useful to take as our starting point the relatively simple

formulation of transference put forward by Freud early in the
second phase:
What are transferences?They are new editions or facsimiles of
the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made
conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have
this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that
they replace some earlier person by the person of the physi-
cian. To put it another way: a whole series of psychological
experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as
applying to the person of the physician at the present moment.
Some of these transferences have a content which differs from
that of their model in no respect whatever except for the
substitution. These then-to keep to the same metaphor-
are merely new impressions or reprints. Others are more in-
geniously constructed; their content has been subjected to a
moderating influence . . .by cleverly taking advantage of some
real peculiarity in the physician's person or circumstances and
attaching themselves to that. These, then, will no longer be
new impressions, but revised editions. [1905e [1901],p. 1161
Originally Freud saw transference as an obstacle to the psycho-
analytic work, but later, in the second phase, he came to view
analysis of the transference as an indispensable technical tool. In
this chapter the term is taken to refer to the development of feel-
ings, attitudes, wishes, and responses towards another person (in
the treatment situation, the therapist) that are derived, unbeknown
to the subject, from earlier (often infantile) experiences and rela-
tionships with significant figures in the environment. Characteris-
tically, transference is a phenomenon that was, from early in this
phase, most clearly seen in the psychoanalytic treatment situation,
in which the analyst reveals as little of his own habits and interests
as possible. The analyst's personality is, to a certain degree, hidden
by a "professional" stance towards the patient. Under such circum-
stances the patient develops beliefs, attitudes, phantasies, feelings,
and responses to the psychoanalyst, many of which are regarded as
being derived from the patient's own past experiences, impulses,
and wishes. Because the analytic situation allows, for a time, the
development of transferences in a form relatively "uncorrected" by
reality, they are felt by the patient to be real and appropriate to the
present. Transference makes use of and incorporates elements of
the patient's perceptions by "cleverly taking advantage of some
real peculiarity in the physician's person or circumstances", as
Freud remarked in the quotation above.
The topographical frame of reference can be utilized in the
following way for an understanding of the processes involved in
transference.' Infantile instinctual wishes directed towards the
objects of childhood (parents, siblings, and other emotionally sig-
nificant figures)are assumed to persist in the Unconscious in crude
and undisguised form. They may be relatively dormant, or they
may be revived by being invested with further quantities of sexual
and aggressive drive energies. The arousal of particular instinctual
wishes in these circumstances may come about from sources
within the individual, or as a result of specific stimulation from the
external world.
The instinctual wish can be understood in this context as con-
sisting of the mental representation of a previously gratifying
situation or situations, now invested with drive energy. The latter
provides the force impelling the wish towards expression and
gratification. The mental representations involved include a
childhood image of the gratifying object and of the object-directed
aim, i.e. of the activity involving the past object which would
yield the wished-for instinctual gratification. In addition to those
childhood memories particularly significant to the individual
concerned, repressed memories of all kinds referring to later ex-
periences may enter into the content of instinctual wishes in the
Unconscious.

We would emphasize that the description of transference processes and

phenomena given in this chapter is rooted in a phase in which the role of
instinctual wishes and impulses was seen as dominant in mental functioning.
Transference was regarded as being exclusively a relatively "surface"manifes-
tation of deep instinctual wishes. Later, the views of transference held by
psychoanalysts underwent some change (see Sandler, Dare, 6r Holder, 1992).
104 S E C O N D PHASE: THE T O P O G R A P H I C A L FRAME

Transference derivatives in the Preconscious

In the second phase, transference processes were thought to

develop only as treatment progressed, induced and facilitated by
the regression-inducing properties of the psychoanalytic situation.
With the arousal, in therapy, of earlier instinctual wishes directed
towards significant objects, these wishes enter the deeper layers
of the Preconscious, where, still outside consciousness, they are
scrutinized and "censored". If, at this point, they are not too threat-
ening to the individual (i.e. do not arouse too great a degree of
conflict), they may be permitted to proceed some distance into the
Preconscious without modification. However, in the non-psychotic
person, those wishes that lie behind transference manifestations
invariably arouse conflict and are then considered by the Precon-
scious as representing a threat to the individual were they to be
permitted direct access to consciousness and action (i.e. access to
the Conscious)in relatively unmodified form. Thus they tend to be
rejected by the Preconscious.
In discussing the mode of functioning of the Preconscious, we
have described how instinctual wishes may, having been turned
back by the censorship, undergo transformation within the Un-
conscious by such primary process mechanisms as condensation
and displacement. Following this, they may be permitted to enter
the Preconscious more readily than previously, inasmuch as they
are now more removed in their ideational content from the content
of the underlying instinctual wish. Alternatively, the strength of
the instinctual drive component of the wish may mount to such a
degree that the barrier between the Unconscious and the Precon-
scious fails, and the instinctual wish, in its more direct form, enters
the Preconscious. However, once in the Preconscious, the form the
wish has thus far assumed will undergo further modification by
the secondary process, with the formation of preconscious derivatives
of the original highly cathected wish.
Such preconscious derivatives may take many forms, one of
these being the transference wish. In the formation of transference
thoughts or wishes the infantile wish is modified and "up-dated"
in the Preconscious. The images representing the childhood aim
and object of the wish are replaced by or integrated with thoughts,
observations, and other material relating to the analyst, as well as
 TRANSFERENCE 105

being subjected to the reality principle. The content of the wish

will be made more rational, its threatening elements disguised,
conflict reduced, and the energic investment of the original object
representation transferred to the image of the analyst. In addition
to what might be called "preconscious rationalization", defence
mechanisms (such as projection) may be employed in order to
render the content of the transference wish more free from conflict
and acceptable to consciousness. In addition, the Preconscious
may, as the wish proceeds in its new form in the direction of the
surface, elaborate tentative preconscious phantasies that represent
forms of disguised fulfilment of the instinctual wish. Preconscious
phantasies include the large class of preconscious transference
phantasies, i.e. products of the imagination that involve a wish-
fulfilling interaction with the analyst. But, of course, not all precon-
scious wishes and phantasies that arise in the course of an analysis
have "transference" content.
It follows that the preconscious transference wish is different
from the unconscious infantile instinctual wish, although it is
derived from and represents the latter. Gratification of such a pre-
conscious derivative is regarded, in this frame of reference, as
permitting the "discharge" of the instinctual energies with which
the unconscious wish had been cathected, these energies having
been transferred or deflected to the preconscious derivative.'
Preconscious transference derivatives may, at any point in their
formation, be turned back and repressed into the Unconscious,
particularly if, for any reason, conflict over them is intensified (as
a consequence, for example, of some remark of the analyst that
is felt to be threatening, or as a result of some upsetting occurrence
in the external world). Moreover, the preconscious derivative may
become in itself increasingly threatening as it approaches conscious
awareness. In such cases the derivatives may be tolerated within
the Preconscious, but kept back at the border between the Precon-

In the second phase, thoughts about the analyst, and wishes towards him,
were not regarded as being "transference"unless the intensity of the precon-
scious wish towards the analyst approached that of the original wish towards
the childhood object. Wishes towards significant people in the patient's earlier
life, which become the basis for transferences, could be derived from any stage
of the individual's psychosexual development.
106 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

scious and the Conscious, i.e. at what has been described as the
"second censorship". The dynamic to-and-fro within the Precon-
scious, and between the Preconscious and the Unconscious, should
be stressed in connection with the whole process of derivative
f~rmation.~

Transference derivatives in the Conscious

It has been pointed out that the Conscious is that part of the
mental apparatus within which consciousness becomes attached
to mental contents. The preconscious transference derivative de-
scribed in the preceding section of this chapter may proceed
directly into consciousness, so that the patient is aware of its con-
tent. This awareness may be dim and fleeting, or extremely intense.
The patient may report it in his free associations in analysis, or he
may consciously withhold it. Commonly, the wish, phantasy, or
thought may be suppressed, so that the patient forgets it; he may,
however, recall it later, particularly if this is facilitated by the
analytic process and the analyst's interventions.
When the preconscious transference derivative is allowed to
become conscious it is regarded as having gained the attention
of the Conscious, which is conceived of as an investment of the
relevant mental content with an additional form of energy, non-
instinctual in nature, and referred to as at tention cathexis.
We have considered the transference derivative formed and
tolerated in the Preconscious as if it were sufficiently disguised in
order to be permitted to enter the Conscious if attention were paid
to it. This is by no means always the case. The preconscious trans-

'The interpretation of preconscious transference wishes, fantasies, and

thoughts is extremely important in clinical psychoanalytic work. These
transferences relate to the "here-and-now"of the analytic situation. Being in
the Preconscious, they are outside consciousness, but are more easily made
accessible through interpretation than wishes (and associated memories) in the
Unconscious. The interpretation of preconscious transference derivatives pro-
vides a route towards the later recall or reconstructionof repressed childhood
wishes and memories.
 ference impulse or thought may be turned back on the threshold of
consciousness for reasons described earlier, and a seconday trans-
ference derivative, one that may now be permitted into conscious-
ness, may have to be formed within the Preconscious. This will
appear in the patient's associations, may be discerned through
acting out, or may be discovered through the analyst's counter-
transference. In this there is often no direct representation of the
analyst, or the thought or phantky may have been rendered in-
nocuous in other ways in order to protect the patient from uncom-
fortable feelings of embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, and the like. It is
one of the analyst's tasks to detect allusions to underlying uncon-
scious transference ideas.
An illustration of what has been described may serve to clarify
the processes involved, though in a simplified and schematic form.

Example A
1. During the course of analysis a male patient's hostile, angry,
and murderous feelings towards his father, deriving from his
childhood, may be aroused in the Unconscious, resulting in an
instinctual wish to attack his father.
2. A transference derivative may be formed in the Precon-
scious, consisting of a wish to humiliate and harm the analyst.
This can be regarded as a primary transference derivative of
the revived childhood wish, "up-dated" in regard to the object,
and slightly changed in aim. This derivative remains precon-
scious, as it could only be tolerated in consciousness if it were
further changed.
3. Under the pressure of the preconscious wish the patient
becomes aware of and reports hostile feelings towards his em-
ployer and speaks of his wish to take revenge on him for some
supposed (or actual but trifling) humiliation. Naturally such
material brought by a patient need not be a reflection of trans-
ference, but if there is evidence from the context of other mate-
rial and indications that it relates to a preconscious transference
wish, this will normally be interpreted to the patient by indicat-
ing that feelings of a similar sort may be present towards the
analyst. This, if it is accepted by the patient, may, in turn, be
108 S E C O N D PHASE: THE T O P O G R A P H I C A L FRAME

linked in the subsequent analytic work with the patient's

hostile wishes towards his father. From the point of view of
psychoanalytic technique, the distinction between revived
childhood impulses in the Unconscious and primary deriva-
tives (including transference derivatives) in the Preconscious,
and secondary transference derivatives or allusions (which can
be in the Preconscious or in the Conscious), is important. This is
because interpretation of contents in the Unconscious before an
understanding of the mental derivatives (especially the trans-
ference derivatives) has been gained may lead to intellectuali-
zation on the part of the patient as a way of covertly resisting
the analytic work.

In order not to complicate matters, the all-important clinical

observations understood as representing so-called transference-re-
sistance have not been commented on. Unacceptable preconscious
transference wishes pressing forward for expression may prompt
the patient to struggle against them, and as a result he may show
resistance to the analysis. Thus, he may, for example, substitute
hostile attitudes in order to disguise emerging loving feelings to-
wards the analyst, or may attempt to placate and appease the
analyst because of the fear of a developing hostile transference.
This type of resistance has the
special quality that it reflects the struggle against infantile im-
pulses that have emerged, in direct or modified form in
relation to the analyst. The analytic situation reanimates, in the
form of a current distortion of reality, material that had been
repressed or had been dealt with in some other way (e.g. by
being channelled into the neurotic symptom itself). This re-
vival of the past in the psychoanalytic relationship can lead to
the transference-resistance . . . [which includes] the conscious
withholding by the patient of thoughts about the analyst, as
well as reflecting unconscious transference thoughts which are
defended against. [Sandler, Dare, & Holder, 1992, p. 1031

Example B
A male patient in his twenties attended for an analytic session
shortly before a holiday, the discussion of which had been part
of the analytic work of the previous few days. He was late for
 TRANSFERENCE 109

his session for no valid reason, and began by speaking of a

friend's holiday plan to travel to a certain town abroad. He
commented that the friend had mentioned, in passing, that his
(the friend's) college tutor was also planning to visit the same
town. The analyst remarked that perhaps the patient had the
thought of going to the place where he believed the analyst
would be spending her own holiday. The patient accepted this
interpretation with relief and proceeded to talk of where, in his
imagination, he thought the analyst might indeed be going for
her holiday. He went on to speak of yet another friend whose
mother had a cottage in the place he imagined to be the ana-
lyst's holiday location. There followed a reverie by the patient
about pleasurable sunbathing and swimming connected in turn
with childhood memories of holidays and long, sunny sum-
mers spent with his family.
Without going into details of the analytic work that ensued, it
became clear to the analyst that the mental events leading to the
patient's associations could be described in the following way
(using the topographical frame of reference):
1. In the Unconscious there existed childhood memories of an
intensely satisfying relationship to his mother, including close
bodily contact with her, reinforced by the fact that he had spent
many nights in bed with her until the age of 5 or 6 years. With
the development of unconscious affectionate feelings towards
the analyst, the infantile memories were invested with sexual
drive energy, so that the wish to have an experience identical
with that which was so satisfactory in childhood arose as an
impulse in the Unconscious. This included the revival of child-
hood wishes that had aims that could be understood as the
desire of a 4- or 5-year-old child for some form of sexual inter-
course with his mother.
2. The wish, in its naked form, had been defended against
in childhood, but was manifested, in disguised form, as a wish
to cuddle the mother and to share her bed. This was linked
with memories of romping in bed with the mother and playing
with her on the beach, where they jointly built sandcastles,
tunnelling in the sand. All of this had been repressed into the
1 10 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

Unconscious, but with the re-arousal of his sexual wishes to-

wards his mother in the analysis, a derivative in the Precon-
scious which contained the less directly sexual elements of his
childhood memories and wishes was created in the form of a
transference wish to be close to the analyst during the holidays,
to spend time on the beach with her, and so on.'
3, However, even the preconscious wish, disguised as it was,
was not permitted to reach consciousness, and the patient
brought secondary derivatives referring to his friend who
would visit the same town as his college tutor. His unconscious
discomfort about the preconscious transference wish had
caused him to develop the resistance to coming to the session,
evidenced by his lateness.
In this case the verbalization of the preconscious transference
wishful phantasy, and the patient's awareness of its acceptance
by the analyst, brought about a feeling of relief and allowed the
patient to elaborate on the previously preconscious thoughts.
These were now in the Conscious, and they led to the subse-
quent discovery of the childhood wishes that had been revived
in the analysis and had resulted in the transference manifesta-
tions. The processes that have been considered in this example
are illustrated diagrammatically in Figure 8.1.

Example C
A middle-aged male patient was in psychoanalytic treatment
because of his and his wife's concern about the gradual "fail-
ure" of their marriage. After some preliminary analytic work

For schematic purposes there is a certain amount of oversimplification

here. It would seem likely that, within this frame of reference, a direct sexual
wish towards the analyst was also formed as a concurrent transference wish,
which could only be tolerated in the deeper strata of the Preconscious. More-
over, the image of the analyst forming part of the ideational content of the
transference wish of the sort described in this example would certainly contain
attributes of the instinctually charged memory of the mother, deriving from the
Unconscious.
 TRANSFERENCE 11 1

system system system

Unconscious Preconscious Conscious
I I 1

I I I
depth surface

FIGURE8.1. A simplified diagram of the development of free associations

in the patient that relate to a transference wish towards the analyst, as
conceived within the topographical frame of reference.
(a) The memory of the sexual relationship with the mother.
(b) Instinctual drive energy.
(c) The combination of (a) and (b) into the instinctual wish to re-
experience the close childhood relationship with the mother, with the
re-gratification of childhood sexual wishes (this is not yet transference).
(dl The wish to cuddle the mother and to share her bed, based on
relatively non-sexual elements in the memory of the relationship to the
mother. '

(el The transference wish to be close to the analyst during the holi-
days and to spend time on the beach with her, derived from (d).
(fl A secondary derivative of the transference wish (and of the in-
fantile sexual wish) that was permitted entry to the system Conscious, in
the form of thoughts displaced away from the analyst and relating to the
patient's friend visiting a holiday town at the same time as his tutor.

he came to realize that over the years he had withdrawn from

emotional contact w i t h his wife. The awareness of this helped
him to develop a heightened motivation for changing himself.
In the session following one in which he had felt that he had
understood something of his difficulties, h e began to speak of
his very first love affair, which had occurred at the age of 30,
112 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

and of his fond recollection of the woman "who understood

him". The patient then began to talk of rather inconsequential
business matters, and the analyst commented that the patient
seemed to have "switched off" emotionally, and that it would
seem that he had to do this in order to push away friendly and
warm feelings towards the analyst that had arisen during the
previous session. The patient agreed that he felt "switched off"
but denied any change in his feelings towards the analyst. He
spoke of these as "friendly but professional". He went on to talk
of a colleague who had, in his opinion, been too easily influ-
enced by his business partner's suggestions, which, he thought,
might land his friend "in deep water". The analyst again
pointed out that the patient seemed to be afraid of the idea that
he might be feeling warmth towards the analyst; if he allowed
this, he would certainly feel that he would be "in deep water".
The patient denied this, but then hesitantly remarked that he
had experienced a flash of pleasure as he entered the analyst's
house that day and had then thought of the danger of treatment
becoming "a habit". This latter thought had worried him. He
then appeared to change the subject and launched into a de-
scription of the analyst's house. The analyst commented that he
had previously used almost exactly the same terms to describe
his mother's house. The patient said that this was "interesting"
and proceeded to speak of how well he managed to get on
with his mother after his father had died (when the patient was
ll), but be recalled that he "had to keep his distance" even
when he was with her. At this point the analyst interpreted that
he, the patient, had "switched off" that day because of his fear
of not being able to continue in the treatment if he became
aware of close and warm feelings for the analyst. The patient
agreed with this and said, as if in confirmation, that if he had
given in to his mother's emotional demands on him, he "would
never have got out of her clutches". The psychoanalyst then
interpreted that, as he saw it, it was the upsurge of the patient's
own affectionate feelings and wishes towards the analyst that
had caused him to "switch off". Furthermore, this was a repeti-
tion of what he had done to protect himself from similar feel-
ings towards his mother for much of his life. Likewise, he had
"switched off" emotionally in his marriage as his fear of a close
 TRANSFERENCE 1 13

emotional relationship with his wife increased. At this point the

patient began to speak of those situations in which he withdrew
from his wife, displaying a great deal of emotion for the first
time in his analysis. His subsequent material related to his fear
of being "hurt", "betrayed", and "wounded" if he exposed his
feelings too much.
The ramifications of this fragment of analysis are extensive.
However, it demonstrates how a patient brought a marital
symptom, essentially of his own unconscious construction, into
the analytic process. In the topographical frame of reference the
essential steps in the development of this transference material
can be reconstructed as follows:
1. In the Unconscious, early memories of oedipal longings for
the mother (together with other memories of childhood experi-
ences of, and adolescent wishes for, closeness with the mother)
had been activated by the development of a close relationship
with a person exciting fondness and affection. The investment
of these memories by instinctual drive excitation led to the
revival of strong instinctual wishes towards the mother.
2. As these wishes intensified, and could not be contained by
repression, they entered the deeper reaches of the Preconscious,
becoming attached to the figure of the analyst, at the same time
producing conflict and anxiety for a variety of reasons, includ-
ing the expectation of physical hurt. The transference towards
the analyst was stimulated by the "good" preceding analytic
sessions and, in turn, revived the earlier conflict. This was dealt
with in the Preconscious by modifying the transference deriva-
tive of the incestuous wish. Thus the sexual feelings and feel-
ings of affection towards the analyst had in turn been altered
in the Preconscious, by the use of habitual defences, so that
the patient remembered (i.e. permitted into the Conscious) his
first love affair with the woman "who understood him". Even
though this was conscious and reported by the patient, he was
only able to bring this material in his analysis by speaking in an
abstracted, non-emotional way ("switching off'). Here he used
the same defensive operation that he had used to deal with and
contain his longings towards his mother when he lived with
1 14 S E C O N D PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

her in the same house. His reference to his "friendly but profes-
sional" relationship to the analyst duplicated the relationship
that he had evolved with his mother and subsequently his wife.
3. After having been confronted by the analyst with his defen-
sive "switching off", a further indication of his preconscious
conflict and sources of anxiety emerged, displaced onto the
friend and colleague who might be too easily influenced by his
business partner's suggestions. This reflected his own fear of
being "in deep water" if he admitted his warm feelings towards
the analyst into consciousness. Here one may say that the
"second censorship" (between the Preconscious and Con-
scious) intervened.
4. This fear was interpreted, and in spite of an initial rejection
by the patient of the analyst's comment, the patient could per-
mit into consciousness a recollection of momentary pleasure at
seeing the analyst. He was also able to be aware of, and to
describe, his awareness of the unease that was linked with this
thought, in the shape of his "worry that treatment might be-
come a habit".
5. Derivatives of the preconscious link between the transfer-
ence derivative and the original incestuous wish towards the
mother (which had arisen in the Unconscious) could now enter
the Conscious. This took the form of a description of the ana-
lyst's house in terms that had previously been used to describe
the mother's and the thought that the patient could get on well
with his mother after his father's death, but "had to keep his
distance from her."
6. The analyst now interpreted that the patient was frightened
of his affectionate feelings towards the analyst, which he had
dealt with by "switching off". This allowed the current precon-
scious fear of the analyst's demands on him to emerge into
consciousness in the form of a memory of the patient's fear of
what he thought of as his mother's dangerous demandingness.
He could also now verbalize (allow into the Conscious) the
thought that emotional "switching off" protected him from
such dangerous demands in the present by referring them back
 TRANSFERENCE 1 15

to the past, i.e. to his relationship to his mother. The knowledge

that he had used this manoeuvre in relation to his feelings
towards the analyst remained preconscious.
7. The analyst could now interpret, and successfully bring into
the Conscious, the way in which the patient had dealt with his
transference feelings and had used similar means to protect
himself against exactly the same feelings towards his wife in
the more recent past, and towards his mother in childhood.
This allowed further material into consciousness, the patient's
thoughts being substantially less separated from the feelings
that accompanied them.

We have given examples of transference phenomena to illus-

trate aspects of the formation of derivatives in the Preconscious
and Conscious within the topographical frame of reference? and
similar processes can be ascribed to the formation of other "deriva-
tives of the Unconscious". We refer here to slips of the tongue,
works of art and other forms of creativity, jokes, phantasies, neu-
rotic symptoms, nochunal dreams, and so forth. The latter are
considered in the next chapter, again with the aim of describing the
application of the topographical frame of reference.

' These examples have, of course, been grossly simplified for expository
purposes. For instance, the role of projected aggression in the transference of
the patient in Example C. has not been mentioned, although it was an impor-
tant element in his fear of being in his mother's (and, in the transference, the
analyst's)"clutches".
CHAPTER NINE

Dream processes

F
or Freud, analysis at the end of the nineteenth century was
very different from analysis as we understand it now. The
aim of the analytic work was to make what was unconscious
conscious, and for that purpose the method of free association was
used (Sandler & Dreher, 1996).However, in spite of the fact that the
phenomenon of transference had been noted previously by Freud
(Breuer & Freud, 1895d), interpretation of the transference was
not used as a tool of psychoanalytic technique in the early part
of the second phase of psychoanalysis. Instead, Freud encouraged
the patient to bring thoughts, free associations, and particularly
dreams to the analysis. As far as dreams were concerned, he asked
the patient to associate to the various elements in the dream. The
meaning of the dream was thenexplained in the light of the analyst's
understanding of the unconscious content behind the dream. Em-
phasis was placed on the retrieval and reconstruction of infantile
experiences and phantasies, particularly those of a sexual nature. It
was believed that the neuroses were an outcome of conflict aroused
by the revival of childhood sexual wishes, whereas the influence of
environmental factors in the patient's current life was relatively
 D R E A M PROCESSES 1 17

understressed. In the early years of the second phase the analyst

was like the scientist who peered through a microscope, recon-
structing the childhood elements in the current material brought
by the patient. As a consequence, because derivatives of primary
process functioning and infantile sexual material were more appar-
ent in the dream than in waking thoughts and phantasies, the
interpretation of dreams was regarded as the "royal road" to the
unconscious workings of the mind. Later developmentsin psycho-
analytic technique, particularly the analysis of transference mani-
festations, opened up other roads to the Unconscious.
The theory of dreams was put forward, together with the first
version of the topographical model, in The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900a). The theory as presented there must be viewed in the
context of Freud's conception at that time that the remembered
traumas of hysterical patients were frequently memories of child-
hood sexual phantasies recalled as "facts". There was a new
emphasis by the analyst on the effect of the patient's infantile
sexual drives and wishes on his current life. Because of the bigger
role played by the analysis of dreams in analytic work at the begin-
ning of this century, several analytic sessions could be spent on the
analysis of a single dream or even on a single dream fragment.
Patients usually understood the methods and aims of the analytic
work and collaborated with the analyst in his particular technique,
accepting the emphasis on their childhood past.'
The psychoanalytic theory of dreams is extremely rich and
complicated, and in this chapter we cannot give a full account of
the theory. We restrict ourselves instead to an outline of the way in
which dreams can be conceptualized in the topographical frame of
reference, and even then we shall simplify greatly. We concentrate
here only on giving enough detail in order to demonstrate the
application and use of this frame of reference, complementing the
previous chapter, in which the clinical phenomena of transference
were considered (Chapter 8). As in that chapter, we are concerned
here with a "derivative of the Unconscious" that has special signifi-

Curiously, if a patient were to concentrate as much on dreams and child-

hood memories nowadays, this would be seen by the psychoanalyst as a
resistance to the expression of thoughts about the present-a view also taken
by Freud in later years.
1 18 S E C O N D PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

cance in the history of psychoanalysis in general and for the second

phase in particular.
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) is the first of Freud's works
to contain a detailed and systematic account of the innovations in
his thinking, and of the conceptualizations that characterize the
second phase. Freud's book on dreams contains the initial version
of the topographical model, specifically elaborated in order to ex-
plain dream processes, although the model was regarded as being
of wider application in the understanding of the whole variety
of phenomena considered to be derivatives of the Unconscious. As
we have seen, the topographical model underwent significant
elaboration during the second phase, but the seventh chapter of
The Interpretation of Dreams is still considered as the most important
exposition of the topographical model. We pointed out previously
that the study of the chapter presents certain problems in that it is
difficult to comprehend and includes a number of propositions
that are over-complicated and superfluous in the light of later
developments. However, dream analysis remains an indispensable
tool in psychoanalytic treatment, and the topographical frame of
reference is our version of the model which has been most widely
used for the psychoanalytic understanding of drearn~.~

The function of dreaming

The chief function of dreams and dreaming is taken to be that of the
preservation of sleep.3This aim is achieved by presenting the Con-
scious with a hallucinatory experience, containing an amalgama-

It is of interest and significance :hat the topographical model has re-

mained, for many psychoanalysts, the model of choice in the consideration of
dreams, although it was followed by the structural model of Freud's third
phase and by further post-Freudian developments.
Research into the psychophysiology of dreaming throws considerable
light on the functions of both sleep and dreaming. REM-phase sleep (charac-
terized by rapid eye movements), in which most dreaming occurs, appears to
be necessary for the maintenance of psychological health and well-being.
Dreaming is more of a regular and necessary function of the mental apparatus
 D R E A M PROCESSES 1 19

tion of elements deriving from the Preconscious and Unconscious,

and representing the disguised fulfilment of a repressed instinctual
wish. Bodily sensations and perceptual (mainly auditory and tac-
tile) stimuli during sleep may contribute to the formation of
dreams and, in part, determine their content. However, the instinc-
tual wishes of the Unconscious are regarded as the chief motivating
forces for the formation of dreams. Even during sleep these wishes
have a peremptory quality, conceived of as a consequence of the
pressure of psychic energy seeking discharge. Processes within the
Preconscious modify and disguise the instinctual wishes in such a
way that they may ultimately receive attention within the Con-
scious as hallucinatory wish-fulfilments, without sleep being dis-
rupted.' In this sense, dreams are comparable to certain neurotic
symptoms, in that they may be regarded as representing compro-
mises between repressed wishes striving for gratification on the
one hand, and the opposing influence of the "censoring" processes
on the other.

The process of dream formation

Dreams are considered to be instigated predominantly by instinc-

tual wishes. However, it is not only instinctual wishes that provide
material for the formation of dreams, but other sources of dream

than Freud could know in 1900, when his knowledge of the frequency of
dreams was based on subjective reports. It could perhaps be said that REM
sleep provides necessary opportunities for dreaming. Dreams have also been
viewed as having a problem-solving function or as a way of processing infor-
mation.
A major cause of waking with an anxiety dream is a failure on the part of
the Preconscious to create sufficient distortion of the drives. The anxiety is a
manifestation of the breakthrough of the insufficiently censored and modified
instinctual wish. The affect of anxiety was regarded as derived from a trans-
formation of the instinctual "energy" with which the wish was "charged".
This conception of anxiety (the so-called "first theory of anxiety") was totally
modified in the third phase. Some anxiety dreams can be understood as gratifi-
cations of a "need for punishment" resulting from severe guilt feelings or
masochistic tendencies (often from a combination of the two).
120 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

content as well. All these "instigatcrs" are known as dream sources.

Predominant among the non-instinctual sources are the more re-
cently formed mental contents that have reached preconscious or
conscious representation during waking life, and which can be
considered to be contents of the Preconscious during the state of
sleep. Conscious or preconscious "unsolved problems" arising dur-
ing the day, representing major current preoccupations, as well as
memories belonging to the preceding day or two (day's residues),
may come into the general category of non-instinctual sources. In
addition, stimuli impinging on the individual from somatic or ex-
ternal sources may also provide material for the dream, or even
play a part in instigating it. Examples of the latter are feelings of
pain or discomfort arising from the body during sleep, and such
external stimuli as the ringing of an alarm clock.
Day's residues are preconscious contents that were active (pos-
sibly even as previously conscious thoughts) during the days pre-
ceding a dream and have, for one reason or another, retained some
investment of preconscious attention after the onset of sleep.
Impressions of the previous day or two, not directly involved
in conflict, may be drawn into the process of dream construction.
They then function to disguise an instinctual wish or its precon-
scious derivative, thus facilitating the evasion of the various cen-
sorships. In summary, day's residues include visual impressions,
memories of thoughts, phantasies, and all sorts of other sensory
impressions. Indeed, they include experiences of any kind--even
those that may have seemed relatively trivial at the t i m e t h a t
occurred during the previous few days.
In the analysis of a dream, elements that are undoubtedly day's
residues may be recalled during free association as unimportant
impressions. They were incorporated into the dream in some form
either because of a connection between such impressions and un-
conscious thoughts and wishes, or because their content rendered
them suitable for the purposes of symbolic representation. In
addition, they are accessible because they are recent. Even in those
instances where the overt content of the dream appears to be domi-
nated by residues from the previous day, it is always assumed, in
this frame of reference, that the dream ultimately represents the
fulfilment of an unconscious instinctual wish. Freud remarked that
the day's residues are only psychical material for the dream-work,
 DREAM PROCESSES 121

just as sensory and somatic stimuli constitute the somatic material

for the dream-work: "The essential factor in the construction of
dreams is an unconscious wish-as a rule an infantile wish, now
repressed-which can come to expression in this somatic or psy-
chical material. . . . The dream is in every case a fulfilment of this
unconscious wish, whatever else it may contain" (Freud, 1913a, p.
274)."
We should distinguish the repressed instinctual wish in the
Unconscious from the broader category of "unconscious wish" in
which the term "unconscious" is used in its descriptive sense, i.e. to
include contents of the Preconscious as well as of the Unconscious.
It should also be noted that the instinctual wish in the Unconscious
is not simply the same as instinctual drive energy but has idea-
tional content. In the previous chapter we pointed out that the
instinctual wish can be regarded as consisting of the mental repre-
sentation of a gratifying situation arising from a memory trace that
has been reinvested with drive energy. The latter impels the wish
forcefully towards expression. A childhood image of the person

On the whole, more importance is ascribed for the understanding of the

psychology of dreams to internal psychological sources than to stimuli arising
from the body or the external world. Only in exceptional circumstances are the
latter considered to be instigators (or "prime movers") of a dream on their own,
as in so-called dreams of convenience. Freud gives an example of such a dream.
He wrote: "Having made it a practice as far back as I can remember to work late
into the night, I always found it difficult to wake early. I used then to have a
dream of being out of bed and standing by the washing-stand; after a while I
was no longer able to disguise from myself the fact that I was really still in bed,
but in the meantime I had had a little more sleep" (Freud, 1900a, p. 125). Here
the external instigator is the perception, during the awakening phase of sleep,
of physical weariness (as opposed to an infantile instinctual wish), which, it
was thought, could, in these circumstances, lead to the production of a dream.
Some (highly unpleasant) dreams or nightmares can occur as a conse-
quence of a traumatic experience, which is relived over and over again in the
dream. This has been regarded as an attempt to work through and master
the anxiety associated with the memory of the traumatic experience and is
frequently seen in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).It would
certainly not be an instance of the dream as an instinctual wish-fulfilment. It
should be said that the mechanisms involved in such dreams have not yet been
clearly understood.
122 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

himself is represented in the wish, as well as an image of the

gratifying object of the past and of that interaction with the object
which would provide the desired gratification. In addition, re-
pressed memories of subsequent experiences may be drawn into
the content of the instinctual wish.
The instinctual wishes may have been pressing towards grati-
fication for some time, or have been relatively dormant until
aroused by the influence of recent experiences, particularly those
that occurred during the day or two preceding the dream. Any
increase in the pressure of an instinctual wish in the Unconscious is
regarded, in the present framework, as the investment of particular
mental contents by instinctual drive energies. The heightened in-
vestment of the contents of the wish increases its peremptory
quality and impels it more strongly towards "discharge" (or "satis-
faction") in relevant physical activity. However, motor activity is
considerably restricted by the state of sleep, being limited to such
phenomena as groaning, grinding of teeth, slight body movements
("restless sleep"), talking or mumbling, and occasionally sleep-
walking. On the other hand, the activation of perceptual representa-
tions is not inhibited in sleep in the same way as motor discharge."
Because the censorship between the Unconscious and Preconscious
is relatively diminished in sleep, the wish passes more readily into

% The Interpretation of Dreams Freud considered the activation of the

perceptual apparatus during sleep to be the result of a reversal of the direction
of a nonnal waking process: "The only way in which we can describe what
happens in hallucinatory dreams is by saying that the excitation moves in a
backward direction. Instead of being transmitted towards the motor end of the
apparatus it moves towards the sensory end and finally reaches the perceptual
[perceptual-conscious] system. If we describe as 'progressive' the direction
taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious during waking
life, then we may speak of dreams as having a 'regressive' character" (1900a, p.
542). It should be noted that this concept is more appropriate to the first version
of the topographicalmodel, which was heavily influenced by the neurological
notion of the "reflex arc". The use of the term "regression" in this context is
quite different from Freud's other uses of the term. This is extremely confusing,
all the more because "regression" is also used in reference to the re-emergence
of infantile wishes and memories in dreams, and the reappearance of develop-
mentally earlier modes of functioning and expression.
the Preconscious, where it undergoes a number of transformations.
This means that, in spite of the partial relaxation of the censoring
function, the instinctual wish in its crude form will usually be
rejected by the censorship. Nonetheless, the wish is able to obtain
access to the Preconscious relatively easily, particularly when
modified by such primary processes as condensation, displace-
ment, and symbolization, as described previously.
All the transformations of the instinctual wish in its passage
from the Unconscious to its final representation in conscious-
ness in the form of a dream are known as the dream-work. This
includes the formation of representations of relatively organized
wish-fulfilments, largely visual and auditory in form, which are
propelled by their instinctual drive cathexis further towards the
boundary between the Preconscious and the Conscious.
The two most essential aspects of the dream-work are the
formation of a modified dream wish and the representation of
the fulfilment or gratification of this wish in such a way that it is
capable of becoming conscious as a perception, i.e. as a hallucina-
tion of a disguised fulfilment of the dream wish. In order to achieve
this end, the dream-work makes use of displacement and con-
densation (characteristic of primary process functioning in the
Unconscious), processes that are further governed by considera-
tions of visual and auditory representability. It is important that
since the dream is a hallucinatory experience, the modification of
dream thoughts, dream wishes, and wish-fulfilments into some
pictorial form is thought to be one of the main functions of the
dream-work:
A thing that is pictorial is, from the point of view of a dream,
a thing that is capable of being represented: it can be introduced
into a situation in which abstract expressions offer the same
kind of difficulties to representation in dreams as a political
leading article in a newspaper would offer to an illustrator.
[Freud, 1900a, pp. 339-3401'

'It is of historical interest that in the consideration of the dream-work

during the first part of the second phase, most emphasis was given to the
primary process elements contained in it, and the unconscious secondary pro-
cess was relatively neglected. This reflected Freud's particular interest in the
124 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

Dream-work is necessitated by the continuing activity of the

censorship during sleep. As we have said, the censorship functions
to protect consciousness from becoming aware of wishes that are,
in one form or another, threatening. Because we need to assume an
unconscious awareness of instinctual wishes and their derivatives
as they approach consciousness, it is necessary to postulate the
existence of an unconscious scanning and scrutinizing function at
the service of the Preconscious and its censorship.
The functioning of the censors during sleep is known as dream
censorship. It is assumed that the dream censorship is less strict than
the censorship that operates during waking life. This accounts for
the common occurrence of quite flagrant expressions of instinctual
drive wishes during sleep in the form of a dream. Nonetheless,
even though the apparent nature of a dream about, for instance, a
homosexual act may seem to represent an undisguised instinctual
wish, analysis of the dream will reveal the censoring function in
certain crucial modifications of the original wish.
As we pointed out in Chapter 4 in our general discussion
of the organization of the mental apparatus within this frame of
reference, the censorship is considered to function at two levels:
between the Unconscious and Preconscious on the one hand, and
between the Preconscious and Conscious on the other. In dreams
the activity of the first censorship modifies the original instinctual

mode of working of the Unconscious, and in the clinical work that he actually
did with his patients when analysing their dreams, i.e. looking behind the
secondary process phenomena for the manifestationsof the primary process. It
should also be remembered that the notion of the "second censorship", al-
though referred to in The Interpretation of Dreams, was only fully introduced in
1915. In 1900 Freud remarked: "The dream-work is not simply more careless,
more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is
completely different from it qualitatively and for that reason not immediately
comparable with it. It does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it
restricts itself to giving things a new form"(1900a, p. 507). However, in our
view, the concept of the dream-work has to include secondary process func-
tioning, outside consciousness, in the system Preconscious. In this frame of
reference, therefore, we include within the concept of the dream-work the
preconscious processes by which the dream is transformed and "prepared" for
consciousness.
 D R E A M PROCESSES 125

drive wish and incorporates it into what is known as the latent

dream content. As we have stressed, this first effort at forming a
modified representation of the original dream wish is unlikely to
be permitted to pass freely through the second censorship and
attain conscious representation as a dream. Further preconscious
modifications of the latent dream and the production of more de-
rivatives become necessary, and the resultant contents present
themselves to the second censorship, the demands of which result
in secondary revision in the course of producing the manifest dream.
The term "latent dream content" is an important one for the
understanding of the formation of dreams within the topographi-
cal frame of reference. In a broad sense, the latent dream content
comprises unconscious contents involved in the process of dream
formation up to the production of the manifest (i.e. consciously
recalled) dream. The latent dream content encompasses the deriva-
tives of the instinctual wish in the Preconscious, the day's residues
and the dream thoughts that are within that system. The latent
dream content thus includes preliminary or trial efforts, represent-
ing attempts to provide hallucinatory fulfilment of unconscious
urges that have not been able to pass the second censorship to
become a manifest dream. The latent dream thoughts, mentioned
above, are best regarded as contents in the Preconscious that are
drawn into the formation of the dream during the course of the
dream-work. Such thoughts may be rational and logical and are
organized according to secondary process functioning. They may
relate to unsolved problems (including reality-based preoccupa-
tions), but may also include other thoughts and conclusions
reached prior to the onset of sleep. They are absorbed into the
process of dream formation because of their associative link with
other dream elements, more directly connected with the latent
dream wish. If the latent dream thoughts are in the form of verbal
representations, they may be given a pictorial character during
the dream-work. As Freud put it, the process of dream formation
leads "from thoughts to perceptual images . . . from the region of
thought-structures to that of sensory perceptions. On this path . . .
the dream thoughts are given a pictorial character" (1905c, p. 162).
The latent dream, which has to pass inspection by the second
censorship, is a mental content with many similarities to the pre-
126 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

conscious transference derivatives that we described in Chapter 8.

It differs from transference derivatives in that the censorships are
more lax during sleep in comparison with their activity in waking
life, and because of the inaccessibility of the motor functions to the
mental apparatus during sleep. Dreams reported during the course
of analysis are, of course, likely to contain elements of transference
wishes and attitudes.
It must be emphasized that the formation of a dream is not
considered to be the result of a smooth flow of mental contents
through the mental apparatus from the depths to the surface. As
modifications and transformations of the instinctual drive wishes
occur, these derivatives may be subject to considerable censoring
and once more become contents of relatively deep layers of the
apparatus, until they have been further modified and sufficiently
disguised to approach the second censorship. The process of dream
formation is therefore considered to be one in which there is a
prolonged dynamic movement to and fro across the layers of the
Unconscious and Preconscious. Freud's notion of these processes
was originally derived from hydrodynamic analogies, in which the
idea of a fluid energy under pressure seeking outlets and meeting
obstructions emphasized this notion of a to-and-fro process.
An important factor that facilitates the representation of in-
stinctual drive derivatives through evasion of the censorship is
that of symbolization. Symbolization constitutes a disguise of the
instinctual wish, and is relatively strongly influenced by primary
processes. The simplest form of symbolic representation usually
involves the representation of a part of the body or a body function
by means of an image that is closely related to it in form, but
sufficiently modified to evade the censorship. For example, the
well-known "phallic symbol" may succeed in reaching the Con-
scious because its representation of the unacceptable image of an
erect penis is not immediately apparent to the dreamer. We may
also find symbols that owe their selection for representing un-
acceptable unconscious content to a whole set of complicated
connections. These can be traced during the course of the analysis
of the dream but are often difficult to reconstruct. Although there
are some recurrent symbolizations of a general kind, common to
the dreams of most people in our culture, it must be stressed that a
 DREAM PROCESSES 127

symbol appearing in a dream will always have an intensely per-

sonal and idiosyncratic meaning. A dream can only be understood
to a significant degree if that personal aspect of the symbol is fully
and successfully investigated by means of free association.
Symbols are particularly useful in the course of dream forma-
tion on account of their ambiguity and their multiplicity of possible
meanings. Visual symbolizations are especially suitable because of
their pictorial character, which facilitates perceptual representa-
tion. Considerations ofrepresentability are generally important in de-
termining the transformationof the latent into the manifest dream.
The final version of the dream must be capable not only of passing
the second censorship, but also of being representable as a halluci-
nation in the form of verbal, visual, or auditory images. Therefore,
one important aspect of the final stages of dream formation consists
in the unconscious (preconscious) choice of appropriate imagery
for the representation of underlying latent dream content.
During sleep, at times when dreaming is not taking place, the
Conscious is said to be "emptied" of attention cathexis. Conscious
awareness is more or less absent. However, during periods of
dreaming, the perceptual vividness of certain dream elements is
sufficiently intense to succeed in arousing and attracting attention
cathexis in the Conscious. By this means the dream attains the
quality of a "reality" in the form of a hallucination. The hallucina-
tory quality of the dream is reflected in the familiar phenomenon of
momentary uncertainty, at the time of waking, as to whether the
events in the dream have actually happened or not.
During and after the process of dreaming, further modifica-
tions of dream contents occur; these are referred to as secondary
revision or secondary elaboration. This process is a sort of further
"editing" of the dream under the influence of the second censor-
ship and in the interests of rationality and intelligibility. It happens
when the dream approaches a waking state, as well as when the
dreamer recounts the dream, and will continue to operate when
the dream is recounted again. Secondary revision makes use of
secondary process functioning and provides the manifest content
of the dream with a faqade of logic, causality, coherence, and
temporal sequentiality. Much of secondary revision occurs uncon-
sciously and can be considered to be an aspect of the dream-work.
128 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

However, it not only provides intelligibility, but also amounts to a

further distortion of the unconscious meaning and sigruficanceof
a dream. Freud wrote that the purpose of secondary revision is "to
get rid of the disconnectedness and unintelligibility produced by
the dream-work and replace it by a new 'meaning'. But this new
meaning, arrived at by secondary revision, is no longer the mean-
ing of the dream-thoughts" (1912-1913, p. 95).
The end product of dream formation-the dream as it is con-
sciously remembered after waking up-is known as the manifest
content of the dream, whether this is in the form of a coherent
whole ("dream faqade") or as something relatively disconnected,
confused, and apparently meaningless. In the clinical interpreta-
tion of dreams the manifest content serves as a starting point for
the understanding and interpretation of the thoughts, phantasies,
and wishes that lie hidden behind it. The analysis of the manifest
content may lead to the reconstruction or recall of those latent
dream thoughts that are thought to contain a clue to the underlying
meaning of the dream-that is to say, to the infantile wish repre-
sented as fulfilled in a disguised way in the dream. What is
consciously remembered as a dream is a substitute for this wish,
one that is acceptable to the ~ensorship.~
In clinical practice the emotional content of dreams is of great
importance. Within the topographical frame of reference it is as-
sumed that affects that are experienced in dreams represent
feelings present in the dreamer at the time of the construction of
the dream. Furthermore, they are regarded as being the dreamer's
own affects, irrespective of whether or not they are attributed to

"I'here are some exceptions to this. For example, in some children's

dreams and in "dreams of convenience" in adults, manifest and latent dream
contents may coincide. There may be fairly straightforward instances of rela-
tively undisguised wish-fulfilment of hunger and thirst in dreams. Children's
dreams may be very explicit fulfilments of wishes that are immediately appar-
ent to adults even though the child may not be as conscious as the adult of the
wishful nature of the dream. In the few special cases where the manifest and
latent dream-contents seem to be largely identical, it can be assumed that the
underlying wish is non-conflictual.
someone else in the manifest content. It should be emphasized that
feeling states have to be regarded as contents of the Preconscious
and that we do not conceive of affects in the Unconscious (although
they were considered by Freud to be drive derivatives). Affects are
considered to be changed least by the dream-work.
The manifest content of dreams often reveals the operation of
defence mechanisms such as negation. For example, if a patient
comments, in relation to a dream, "it is strange, but I felt no anxiety
whatsoever", it is likely that anxiety represents an important ingre-
dient of the latent dream content.
In summary, the dream represents a conscious experience
during sleep, one in which an instinctual wish-fulfilment is repre-
sented, so that "discharge" by way of hallucinatory gratification is
achieved. The wish-fulfilment is experienced in disguised form,
and so the dreamer is normally unaware of the meaning of his
dream. It is only this lack of conscious awareness of the sigrufi-
cance of the wish involved that permits the dream to occur at
all-it has passed the censorships, and no uncomfortable secrets
have been revealed to the dreamer's consciousness. The dream can
be considered to be an end-product of a process of transfonna-
tion-the dream-work-applied to the infantile instinctual wish.
In the passage of the dream from its origins in the Unconscious
through the Preconscious to the relatively superficial Conscious, a
number of processes occur:

1. The ideational content of the original instinctual wish under-

goes primary process transformation, as described in Chapter 8.
2. A derivative of the instinctual wish is elaborated in the Precon-
scious. This derivative amalgamates current and past pre-
occupations, thoughts, and memories. Present conscious or
preconscious concerns and day's residues play an especially
important role. At the same time, an attempt is made, in the
Preconscious, to construct a fulfilment of the instinctual wish
derivative, but this tentative wish-fulfilment may not yet be
acceptable to the "second censorship" between the Precon-
scious and Conscious. Several "trials" may have to be made
before a suitably disguised wish-fulfilment is constructed. In
the elaboration of the wish-fulfilment, "considerations of
130 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

representability" apply-i.e. the ideational content involved

needs to find a suitable perceptual representati~n.~
3. The process of secondary revision or secondary elaboration
occurs at the point of transition of the developing dream from
the Preconscious to the Conscious and is continued after the
dream has been consciously experienced.

Two examples are given below to illustrate the formation of

dreams, using the topographical frame of reference. In Example A,
the process of dream formation is described, commencing with
the "instigating" drive impulses arising within the Unconscious,
tracing the modifications brought about by the dream-work, and
ending with the remembered dream. Example B starts with a de-
scription of a manifest dream, of the sort recounted in clinical
practice, which is then traced back to its latent sources and con-
tents. It should be stressed that alternative formulations are pos-
sible, and that the examples are given only for the purpose of
illustrating the application of the topographical frame of reference
to the understanding of dream formation. It should also be noted
that it is highly likely that the same wishes in the Unconscious that
find expression in the dream at night may have been active during
the preceding day, leading to the formation of preconscious (or
even conscious) ideas, thoughts, or phantasies (including transfer-
ence thoughts). However, these may not have been able to provide
a sufficient degree of drive discharge during the day. The daytime
derivatives may then be drawn into the dream. The hallucinatory
experience of the dream provides a much greater degree of con-
cealed wish-fulfilment-and therefore of instinctual drive dis-

Thus,for example, relatively abstract preconscious thoughts, which have

become connected with an infantile instinctual wish, may find perceptual
representationin their literal or concrete rather than in their abstract forms. An
instance of this is the thought "he is a pain in the neck' finding experiential
representation in a dream experience of "my neck hurts". This also illustrates
the similarity between the process of dream formation and the unconscious
construction of certain neurotic symptoms, such as a hysterical pain in the
neck.
 DREAM PROCESSES 13 1

chargethan is possible in preconscious or conscious phantasies.

Finally, attention is drawn again to the central role attributed to
the instinctual wish in the Unconscious in this frame of reference.
This emphasis dominated the whole of the second phase of psycho-
analYsis.'O

Example A
1. At a certain point in the analysis of a young man,repressed
incestuous wishes towards his mother were mobilized in the
Unconscious. In theoretical terms, these wishes can be consid-
ered to have received an increased cathexis of instinctual drive
energy. This heightened investment gave the wish momentum
towards surface expression and gratification (discharge).In this
case the sexual wish towards the mother was revived by in-
creasing unconscious tender and sexual feelings towards the
analyst.
2. The passage of the unmodified incestuous wish through
the mental apparatus was impeded by the first censorship,
between the Unconscious and Preconscious. As a consequence,
a first derivative of the original instinctual wish was formed in
a primary process fashion, involving the displacement of in-
stinctual cathexis onto memories that were associatively linked
with the repressed sexual impulse. In this example, the revived
wish for sexual intercourse with the mother was transformed
by displacement onto memories of a past activity in which the
patient and a friend of his had "wrestled" with the patient's

lo Despite the fact that present-day clinical psychoanalytic work makes use
of many of the concepts of later phases, the topographical frame of reference
remains useful for many purposes. This is true in regard to the clinical utiliza-
tion of dreams despite the fact that many psychoanalysts are now more
concerned than in the past with the use of dreams as a way of understanding
what is currently happening in the patient. In particular, emphasis is put on the
way in which unconscious transference thoughts show themselves in dreams.
It can be said that today the dream is used for its value as a "royal road" to the
Preconscious at least as much as to the Unconscious.
132 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

older adolescent sister for the possession of a "pin-up" maga-

zine.
3. The wish now took the form of a desire to re-experience the
exciting wrestling with the sister, and it was permitted entry
into the Preconscious. It would be unlikely that a wish for such
scarcely disguised physical activity, so close to the incestuous
instinctual wish, would have been allowed to pass readily
through the first censorship during waking life. However, dur-
ing sleep the censoring activity is considered to be relatively
diminished. In this patient the wish towards the sister imrnedi-
ately became amalgamated with preconscious transference
thoughts and feelings about the analyst.
4. Further passage of this particular derivative through the
mental apparatus was opposed by the second censorship be-
tween the Preconscious and Conscious. This led to a great deal
of mental activity within the Preconscious, in which a wide
variety of mental contents (e.g. day's residues, distant mem-
ories, recent thoughts, and daydreams) were drawn upon by
the dream-work in the attempt to form a derivative that would
pass the second censorship, while some elements that repre-
sented the original instinctual wish, as well as transference
elements, were included. In the formation of this patient's
dream, the dream-work made use of the associative link with a
memory of a discussion that the patient had recently had with
his sister. This had been about a suggestion she had made that
she and he take a holiday together, and it included some talk of
the difficulty in obtaining two single rooms, and the possibility
that they might have to share a bedroom. The memory of this
now became incorporated into the latent dream wish, together
with a thought that the patient had previously reported to his
analyst about going on holiday with her.
5. In order to safeguard sleep and yet achieve a disguised
satisfaction of the instinctual wish, further dream-work
occurred. Its task was to modify the latent dream content in the
Preconscious, to disguise it sufficiently, and to give it pictorial
quality so that it could pass the second censorship and be
acceptable to the Conscious. As a consequence, the representa-
 tions of the sister and the analyst were condensed and replaced
by that of a woman known to the patient, whom he did not
find attractive. With this change in object the feeling of sexual
desire and attraction (first to the mother, then to the sister, and
currently to the analyst) was replaced by its opposite, a feeling
of revulsion.
6. The modified dream wish and dream thoughts were now
essentially concerned with the patient's mixed feelings about
spending a holiday with an unattractive woman by whom he
felt repelled. In this form, the latent dream content was suf-
ficiently disguised to be allowed to proceed past the second
censorship, to gain the attention of the Conscious, and to find
hallucinatory expression there as a dream. The nature of the
transformation of latent into manifest content is such that the
manifest dream always contains at least a partial, albeit hidden,
representation of satisfaction of the underlying instinctual
wish."
7. The outcome of the dream-work was, in this example,
a series of images of sufficient sensory vividness to be able
to attract attention cathexis from the Conscious and, in the
absence of opposing preconscious censoring processes, to be
experienced as a dream. These images included the perception
of an unattractive woman and of looking at brochures in a
travel agency. This was accompanied by a sense of repugnance
coloured by slight feelings of tension.
8. During the process of this content becoming conscious,
and continuing after it, the next stage in the formation of the
dream occurs (i.e. the work of secondary revision or secondary
elaboration),beginning in the most superficial strata of the Pre-

l1 We would remind the reader that we are giving a simplified account of

the modifications brought about through the agency of the dream-work. The
work represents a mental activity that we could call the "dream struggle", in
which both primary and secondary processes are involved. The modification of
the latent dream wish is brought about by rapid back-and-forth movements
across the first censorship into the Preconscious, not only in order to achieve a
greater degree of disguise but also to draw upon images that lend themselves
to pictorial representation.
134 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

conscious. Through this process the separate hallucinatory im-

ages and feeling states were joined together into a coherent
sequence in keeping with the requirements of reality and of
secondary process functioning. The dream reported by the
young man in his psychoanalytic session was as follows: "I was
at a travel agency, looking at brightly coloured brochures. I
knew I was talking to the woman who was with me, and I was
excited about the prospect of going on holiday with her. When
I turned to her I was filled with a feeling of surprise and repug-
nance, for she suddenly struck me as so unattractive. She was
fat and ugly and her face was full of pimples."
9. In the special conditions of the partial disinhibition that de-
velops in the psychoanalytic treatment situation, some of the
preconscious material involved in the formation of the dream
could be recovered in consciousness through the process of free
association. In this way certain day's residues were recalled.
After his previous session the patient had noticed a travel
agency and had experienced a momentary wish to go on holi-
day (this was later seen to be c o ~ e c t e dwith wishes to escape
from the analysis of his sexual wishes towards his analyst).
Someone at the patient's office.hadbeen talking about holiday
plans. This led the patient to ;ecall that, a few days previously,
he had a discussion with his sister about their spending a holi-
day together. In reporting this discussion, he also added that
they had joked about the possibility of their having to share
a room at one stop-over point on the journey. As he paused
and mused over this discussion with his sister, he reported a
memory from adolescence of the tussle and teasing between
his sister and himself in the presence of his friend. He had
previously spoken of an occasion when he had seen his sister's
growing breasts and had thought that her nipples looked like
pimples. The patient went on to comment that the woman in
the dream could not be his sister, for she looked so different
and was so unattractive (an example of the defence mechanism
of negation). In the dream, the pin-up magazine over which he
had wrestled with his sister had been transformed into the
more neutral holiday brochure. When it was pointed out that
there might be some thoughts about the analyst involved in the
 D R E A M PROCESSES 135

patient's dream, the patient was able to confirm that he had

wondered about where the analyst was going on holiday, and
had indeed had the fleeting thought that they might choose the
same place and meet accidentally. Later material confirmed the
existence of the patient's conflictual wish to have a close sexual
relationship with the analyst,'Z and this was further understood
by both analyst and patient as a transference onto the analyst
of feelings originally experienced towards the sister and the
mother.

Example B
A young married man was in analysis because of worries
about his potency and occasional panic attacks when travelling
on crowded underground trains. After a few months of treat-
ment, on the day after the analyst had presented him with
the monthly bill, he began the session by reporting a dream in
which he saw two men fighting. He said that he remembered
nothing else about the dream except a sense of pity for the man
who seemed to be losing. He pondered on the dream, saying
that perhaps it had something to do with a boxing match that he
had seen on television the previous evening. He had felt sorry
for the man who had lost the bout. He then talked of the only
time in his life when he had actually gone to watch a boxing
match. This was in his childhood,when he had been taken there
by his father. He recalled enjoying the occasion very much, but
wondered how he could have been so callous as a child as to
watch something brutal. At this point the analyst realized that
this usually punctilious patient had, for the first time, failed to
bring the cheque for his fees the day after the bill had been
presented. The patient, meanwhile, had moved on to talk about
aggression in a rather intellectual way, which appeared to the
analyst as an attempt to get away from the dream and its sig-

l2 It is of some interest that, when the analyst first interpreted the patient's
transference wish, the patient's response was, "but I am not attracted to you at
all-you are not my type". The analyst was then able to show the patient the
defensive aspect of his reaction and the underlying unconscious transference
wish.
136 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

nificance. However, the patient then spoke of an angry dispute

between two colleagues which, once more, reminded him of the
dream. At this point the analyst interpolated the comment that
the patient had looked rather annoyed when presented with the
bill the day before, and that this, together with the fact that he
had not brought the cheque as he usually did, might indicate
that the sort of anger that his quarrelling colleagues showed
paralleled feelings of his own towards the analyst for giving
him the bill. The patient acknowledged that he had thought the
day before that the analyst was undoubtedly richer than he, and
he recalled that he had felt "unreasonably" irritable at the time.
He now realized that he had indeed felt angry with the analyst,
and still did.
From his knowledge of the patient, and from the material
brought in that session, the analyst was able to arrive at a
partial understanding of the dream, which appeared to have
been occasioned by the patient's need to ward off the feelings of
anger and resentment about the bill he had been given. This
appeared, in turn, to be related to much earlier feelings of anger
towards his father, feelings that accompanied phantasies of
fighting and beating the father, fostered and stimulated by his
attendance at the boxing-match as a child. At the same time the
patient had strong affectionate feelings towards his father (as he
now did towards the analyst),and this had caused him conflict.
The existenceof these conflicting feelings, together with the fear
of father's retaliatory capacity, had led to the repression of the
wish to attack and triumph over father. The wish was stimu-
lated by the resentment of the wealthier analyst, but the dream-
work must have involved the replacement of the aggressive
wish by the pleasurable memory of watching the boxing match
with father, a memory in which the patient's aggressive wish
towards his father was displaced. The feelings of triumph that
would accompany the fulfilment of the wish to overcome father
were replaced by pity for the loser. It is, of course, highly
likely that the patient's actual dream experience contained far
more content than was reported in the session, for the ongoing
secondary revision frequently causes a forgetting of all or parts
of a dream.
 D R E A M PROCESSES 137

Using the topographical frame of reference, the dream can be

understood schematically, as follows:
1. In the Unconscious the infantile wishes to attack and beat the
father, to remove him from his position as possessor of the
mother, remained repressed, but were still cathected and
sought some form of representation, discharge, and gratifica-
tion. Alongside these hostile and even murderous wishes were
longings for closeness with the father. We can conjecture that,
earlier in the life of the patient (e.g. at the time of the visit to the
boxing-match with father), phantasies representing the fulfil-
ment of both types of wish had been permitted representation
in some form within the Preconscious or in the Conscious.
These phantasies would subsequently have been firmly re-
pressed as they came into conflict with the developing social
and moral values of the child. We can assume within this frame
of reference that the patient's anger with the analyst over the
bill heightened the level of instinctual drive cathexis of the
aggressive wishes.
2. During the dream phase of sleep the lowered censorship
between the Unconscious and Preconscious allowed the re-
pressed wishes to impinge on preconscious contents with
which they could be associatively linked and interwoven. In
our example these included day's residues as well as childhood
memories. Significant among the day's residues were the box-
ing-match seen on television the previous evening, the analyst's
presentation of the bill, and the accompanying but unexpressed
emotional reaction to it. The significant childhood thoughts
were of the acceptablepleasure and excitement associated with
the visit to the prize-fight.
3. The amalgam of contents from the Unconscious and Precon-
scious, cathected by instinctual drive energy, had an impetus to
move through the mental apparatus towards consciousness. In
general, the contents of the wish derivatives have the potential
for perceptual representation. There are three possible vicis-
situdes that such latent dream contents can undergo during
sleep. First, they may be sufficiently vivid and adequately dis-
guised that they can pass the second censorship and arouse the
138 SECOND PHASE: THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FRAME

attention of the Conscious, so that a dream is experienced. (It

would be unusual in an adult for a first wish derivative to find
direct expression in a dream.) Second, the contents may not yet
be sufficiently disguised and thus will be rejected by the second
censorship. Third, the disguise may be sufficient but the con-
tents do not have enough sensory vividness to be able to be
experienced as a dream hallucination in the Conscious. In the
case of the second and third alternatives, the dream-work con-
tinues to operate on the latent dream content in order to achieve
a sufficiently disguised wish-fulfilment and to increase the
degree of its representability. This involves a continuous move-
ment of amalgamated and transformed contents back and
forth across the boundary between the Unconscious and Pre-
conscious, the censorship being diminished during sleep. Thus
both primary and secondary process functioning are involved.
Ultimately this leads to images-representative of the original
instinctual wish-that can gain access to conscious registration
while carrying sufficient of the original drive cathexis to pro-
vide gratification through the dream. In the present example,
the dream, prior to its secondary elaboration, seemed to have
consisted of the sight of two men (other than the dreamer)
fighting, with one man losing, i.e. being knocked down. The
dream images seem to have been accompanied by a number
of feelings, of which the patient could only report pity for the
loser.
4. The hallucinated dream images are affected by secondary
revision, involving secondary process thinking, both during the
experiencing of the dream and afterwards, as well as before
and during the process of recall. The defensive processes that
enter into secondary revision show themselves as resistances in
the treatment session-in this case, the patient's resistance to
full awareness of his own anger and hostility. Some of the
feelings and ideas entering into the dream could be recovered
in the analytic session with the aid of appropriate interpreta-
tions, even though a rather fragmentary manifest dream had
been reported.
 PART Iv

Further aspects
CHAPTER TEN

Narcissism and object-love

I he second phase of psychoanalysis lasted from 1897 to

the publication of The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1923b).In this
phase the topographical model of the mental apparatus,
first put forward by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a),
underwent considerable modification, forced on Freud by his clin-
ical experience. Consequently a radical change in his theoretical
model became inevitable. The factors prompting the change from
the topographical to the structural model in 1923 are discussed in
the next chapter.
Certain significant psychoanalytic concepts were introduced
during the course of the second phase, and these were not ade-
quately encompassed by the different forms of the topographical
model as presented by Freud, nor have they been appropriately
taken into account in the composite topographical frame of refer-
ence as we have presented it. Perhaps the most important of these
are the concepts of narcissism and of object-love.This chapter gives
a schematic account of these two concepts as they were seen in the
second phase of psychoanalysis. It is important to note that after
the second phase the concept of narcissism was more fully incor-
porated into Freud's model of mental functioning, although it also
142 FURTHER ASPECTS

became much more complex. From the late 1960s there has been an
increase of interest in the topic of narcissism, from the point of
view of both psychopathology and treatment (e.g. see Grunberger,
1989; Kernberg, 1975; Kohut, 1971; Rosenfeld, 1987)' Some of the
issues given prominence in the psychoanalytic literature, following
Freud's paper, are the so-called object relationship theories and the
modern conceptualization of borderline and narcissistic personal-
ity disorders. In addition, Freud's paper "On Narcissism" (1914~)
opened up the way for further considerations of the important
topic of identification. However, we believe that it is of value to
distinguish clearly the relevant formulations of the second phase
from those that came later.
During this phase Freud developed the theory of the instinctual
drives, first seen as the pressure of a sexual (libidinal) energy
which sought "discharge" in some form of physical or mental act-
ivity. The concepts of drive-energic source, aim, object, and pressure
were discussed in Part 111, as was the concept of energic investment
or cathexis. To love someone was conceived of theoretically as to
cathect the "object" with libidinal energy. In this context the term
"object" included the perceptual "representation" ("presentation")
that arose from experience with the real external object (perception
was regarded as normally being, after a certain age, a much more
veridical reflection of "external reality" than it would be regarded
today). Even though Freud spoke of the "cathexis of the object"
(e.g. the mother), he always took the view that the investment
of energy was in the percept, image, memories of the object. In
what follows, it is assumed that the idea of cathexis of an object
implies the cathexis of some form of mental representation of the
object.
The idea of the energic cathexis of the object with libido had
existed from the beginning of the second phase. However, the idea
of the subject being similarly cathected with his own libido was not
put forward explicitly as "narcissism" until Freud's famous paper
"On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914~)~ although it was adum-
brated as early as 1910in a footnote added to a later edition of Three

Freud's theory of narcissism, as well as the contributions of later writers,

are comprehensively discussed in a monograph published by the International
PsychoanalyticalAssociation (Sandier, Person, dr Fonagy, 1991).
Essays on the Theory of Sewlily (1905d, p. 145).While the "Narcis-
sism" paper is rich and rewarding to read, we make use of only
certain aspects of it for our purposes, as well as drawing on other
writings of Freud and, again, we attempt to simplify matters as
much as possible.
Early in the second phase the instinctual drives were regarded
as entirely sexual in nature, being composed of drive components
that were developmentally linked with different erotogenic areas
of the body (so-called part instincts, partial drives, component in-
stincts, etc.). Aggression was seen as an ego-drive ("ego instinct")
functioning in the service of self-preservation. It is of particular
interest that the term "ego" was not used in the sense in which it
was to be employed in the structural model of the third phase, but
had a variety of meanings, including consciousness, as well as
being a reference to the subject himself. In this chapter we use the
term "self' rather than "ego" in those contexts where Freud used the tern
"ego" to contrast the subject, on the one hand, with the object, on the
other.
At this point we can put forward the following simple formu-
lation. Libidinal cathexis of the object is object-love, and libid-
inal cathexis of the self is narcissism. Here the self is regarded as
paralleling the object in the individual's mind. According to the
formulations of the second phase, love of another is object-love,
while love of oneself is narcissism.
Freud often appeared to make the assumption that the indi-
vidual had a fixed quantity of libido at his disposal. The more
libido invested in the object, the less in the self, and vice versa.
Libidinal cathexis could be transferred from self to object and from
object to self: "The more of the one is employed, the more the other
becomes depleted" (Freud, 1914c, p. 76). This is seen in its most
extreme form in the state of being in love, in which it was postu-
lated that there is an almost complete investment of libido in the
object, with a corresponding depletion of libidinal cathexis of the
self.2In contrast, certain pathological states (e.g. melancholia and

Being loved by the object was thought to restore the individual's narcis-
sism. However, the contradictionbetween this formulation and the idea of the
distribution of a fixed quantify of libido between self and object was never
satisfactorily resolved Uoffe & Sandler, 1967).
144 FURTHER ASPECTS

paranoia) were regarded as involving a far-reaching withdrawal of

libido from (a decathexis of) objects and a heightened investment
(a hypercathexis) of the self. In addition, in sleep or illness an
increased libidinal cathexis of the self and a withdrawal of libido
from objects is postulated. The distinction between object-cathexis
and self-cathexis (or "narcissistic" cathexis) did not imply that the
libido involved in either was qualitatively different, but rather that
its location differed?
Freud distinguished between prima ry and secondary narcissism,
and an understanding of this distinction is important. In our view
the delineation of the differences between primary and secondary
narcissism, and between narcissism and object-love, can best be
understood from a developmental point of view.

The earliest state: primary narcissism

For the purpose of this theoretical outline we can assume that

narcissism exists from the moment that the infant has a rudimen-
tary awareness of himself, even though he or she may not have
differentiated the primitive perception of the object from himself.
It is legitimate to assume that the confusion of perceptual aspects
of the self and the object represents a primitive undifferentiated ex-
periential self, and that the libidinal investment of the pleasurable
aspects of this primitive self-experience can be regarded as the
beginnings of primary narcissism4.

However, even in 1914, Freud was moving towards the idea that the
transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido was normally accom-
panied by a change in the aim of the drive, a change in the direction of desexu-
alization.
The state of primary narcissism was regarded as existing well before
object-love comes into being. The gaining of sensual pleasure through instinc-
tual activity was first viewed as occurring via autoerotic activities (by which
Freud did not mean self-stirnulationbut, rather, all direct sensual gratification
via the erotogenic zones-in the beginning, predominantly the mouth and
lips). He remarked that "Originally, at the very beginning of mental life, the
ego [self]is cathected with instincts and is to some extent capable of satisfying
them on itself. We call this condition 'narcissism' and this way of obtaining
satisfaction'auto-erotic'. At this time the external world is not cathected with
 NARCISSISM A N D OBJECT-LOVE 145

FIGURE 10.1. The "primary undifferentiated pleasure-self" or undifferen-

tiated selflobject. The dotted lines indicate the beginnings of a self
boundary in the mind of the infant. The shading represents libidinal
cathexis. This is the state of "primary narcissism".

With the child's development, boundaries between "self" and

"non-selfffbegin to be constructed (so-called ego boundaries), but
even when this process is well advanced, the infant, according to
Freud, attempts to maintain all that is pleasurable as part of the self
(or, more precisely, the representation of the self) and to allocate
all that is unpleasurable or painful to the "non-self" or "not-me".
During the phase of primary narcissism the object is delineated
as part of the "non-self" and distinguished from the self. But at first
the object is not cathected with libido, all libidinal energy being
invested in the self (Freud referred to this as the "purified pleasure-
ego", but "pleasure-self" would be more appropriate).
Figure 10.1 represents the state of affairs when the boundary
between self and "not-self" has not yet been f i d y constructed and

interest (in a general sense) and is indifferent for purposes of satisfaction.

During this period, therefore, the ego-subject [self] coincides with what is
pleasurable and the external world with what is indifferent (or possibly
unpleasurable)" (1915c,pp. 134-135). However, it is clear that Freud was often
confused about the relation between narcissism and autoerotism, having also
postulated a "phase" of autoerotism preceding that of primary narcissism
(1914~).This latter statement occupied psychoanalytic scholars for many years,
but the problem is not important for our present purposes. Indeed, we can now
assume, in the light of the findings of psychoanalytic developmental research,
that the concept of primary narcissism and the problem of distinguishing
narcissism from autoerotism is more or less redundant.
146 FURTHER ASPECTS

FIGURE10.2. The boundary between the mental representations of "self"

and "not-self" has been established. The "not-self" includes the object,
but only the "self" is cathected with libido (shaded area). The object is
only of interest in its function as a vehicle for need-satisfaction.

what can be called the state of "primary identification" obtains.

Figure 10.2 indicates the continuation of the state of primary
narcissism after the boundary between self and object has been
constructed. In this state the self can be viewed as the first "love-
object", but the object as such is regarded as having little or no
investment with libido.

Object-love and residual narcissism

Object-love is conceived of as the investment of the object with

libido. The libidinal cathexis of the object is regarded as coming
about as a consequence of a displacement of some of the libidinal
investment of the self, now extended to include the object (see
Figure 10.3).Freud likened this process to an extension of a pseudo-
podium by an amoeba: "We form the idea of there being an original
libidinal cathexis of the ego [self],from which some is later given
off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to
the object-cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the
pseudopodia which it puts out" (1914~~ p. 75).
With the development of object-love, a state of residual narcis-
sistic cathexis of the self persists and coexists with object-love. This is
 NARCISSISM AND OBJECT-LOVE 147

FIGURE 10.3. The extension of libidinal investment from self to object.

The arrow indicates the movement of libido from self to object. A state
of libidinal cathexis of the object now coexists with the residual narcis-
sistic cathexis of the self.

seen as the normal state of affairs, in which a "hydraulic balance"

between residual narcissism and object-love occurs. In certain
states (such as falling in love), the object is hypercathected with
libido and the self depleted. In other conditions (e.g. paranoia) the
greater part of the libido is regarded as having been withdrawn
from the objects and reinvested in the self.5
Object-love is seen as gradually following on the discovery
by the child that the object is found to be a source of pleasure and
that the infant is dependent on the object for the satisfaction of
its needs.The "cupboard-love" that creates the path to object-love
is referred to as theanaclitic or "attachment" type of relationship.
Freud summed up his view of the processes involved as follows:

It is recognized by many nowadays that the situation described here,

involving a relatively simple notion of the distribution of libido between self
and object, is inadequate and clinically misleading. For example, the schizo-
phrenic may give the impression to the observer of having withdrawn libido
from the objects in the external world, but they may in fact be intensely
cathected in fantasy life. Similarly, the theory as presented here does not
answer the question of why it is that when one is in love, and feels loved in
rehun, the self does not at all appear to be depleted of libidinal cathexis.
148 FURTHER ASPECTS

A child's first erotic object is the mother's breast that nourishes

it; love has its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for
nourishment. There is no doubt that, to begin with, the child
does not distinguish between the breast and its own body;
when the breast has to be separated from the body and shifted
to the "outside" because the child so often finds it absent, it
carries with it as an "object" a part of the original narcissistic
libidinal cathexis. This first object is later completed into the
person of the child's mother, who not only nourishes it, but
also looks after it and thus arouses in it a number of other
physical sensations, pleasurable and unpleasurable. By her
care of the child's body she becomes its first seducer. In these
two relations lies the root of a mother's importance, unique,
without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime
as the first and strongest love-object and as the prototype of all
later love-relations-for both sexes. [1940a (1938), p. 1881

Secondary narcissism

Secondary narcissism refers to that quantity of libidinal cathexis

of the self which results from the withdrawal of a certain amount of
libido from the object. It is secondary only in that it is a reinvest-
ment of libido in the self, as opposed to primary narcissism and
the narcissism that remains even after object-love has been estab-
lished. Secondary narcissism augments the existing residual lib-
idinal cathexis of the self, just as further deposits into a bank
account increase the total balance in the account. It should be noted
that libido invested in an object is never completely withdrawn;
some libidinal object-cathexis always remains.l
Freud saw secondary narcissism as occurring in the following
circumstances:

1. In certain pathological conditions, in which there is a with-

drawal of love from the objects (Figure 10.4).

W s applies after so-called "libidinalobject-constancy"has been reached

(Burgner & Edgcumbe, 1972). In the very young infant the image of the object
may be cathected only when the appropriate instinctual drive (associated with
a bodily need) is aroused.
 NARCISSISM AND OBJECT-LOVE 149

FIGURE 10.4. Secondary narcissism deriving from withdrawal of libido

from the object, augmenting the residual narcissistic cathexis of the self.
The arrow shows the hypothetical direction of flow of libido.

2. In certain normal states such as sleep, physical illness, etc.

(Figure 10.4).
3. In states of disappointment with the object, as a consequence of
mourning for a "lost" object, etc. (Figure 10.4).
4. As a normal developmental process, occurring via identifica-
tion with an object (Figure 10.5).This identification occurs as a
consequence of the modification of the self so that it resembles
the object in some important characteristic. Some of the libidi-
nal cathexis of the admired or loved characteristic of the object
is then transferred to the self as a consequence of this identifi-
cation.
6. When the person lives up to his ideals (as embodied in his
ideal seIf--see the next section).

A note on the ego ideal

The concept of the ego ideal (a precursor of the superego concept

of the structural model of the later third phase) was put forward
by Freud in his "On Narcissism" paper (1914~).It should perhaps
more properly be called the "self ideal" or "ideal self", in that it
150 F U R T H E R ASPECTS

via secondary
___+
identification

FIGURE 10.5. An illustration of the means by which the individual's

narcissism (self-cathexis)is increased by the mechanism of secondary
identification. An admired, valued, or esteemed aspect of the represen-
tation of the object is intensely cathected with libido, but this libido
can be transferred to the self-representation by copying the "valued"
attribute of the object via identification. As a consequence, a part of
the self is then regarded as being identical with the "valued" aspect
of the object, and the libidinal cathexis of the self is increased, while
the cathexis of the object is lessened. This is a common method of
obtaining secondary narcissism. It should be noted that there is no "loss"
of the image of the object (or an aspect of it) in this case but, rather, a
withdrawal of libido from object to self because the self has been altered
by identification so that it is now admired and valued as the object
was.

can be regarded as a mental representation of an "ideal" state of

the self, as taken over from the parents. The development of the
individual's ideal was seen to be connected with the disruption of
the early primary narcissistic state. Freud remarked that: "The
development of the ego [self]consists in a departure from primary
narcissism and gives rise to a vigorous attempt to recover that
state. This departure is brought about by means of the displace-
ment of libido on to an ego ideal [ideal self] imposed from without;
and satisfaction is brought about from fulfilling this ideal" (1914~~
p. 100).
He also commented: "The subject's narcissism makes its
appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the
infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection there is of
 NARCISSISM A N D OBJECT-LOVE 151

.
value. . .What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute
for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own
ideal" (1914c, p. 94).
In the narcissism paper Freud distinguished between the ideal
and the conscience, the "self-criticizing faculty", although the two
concepts were later to be amalgamated into the superego (Freud,
1923b)?The model created by the child for its ideal is based, in the
first instance, on the parents and their standards and expectations
and can be regarded as a way of transmitting societal and cultural
values.
It is clear that although Freud first contrasted narcissism
with object-love, he also conceived of libido as being capable of
being invested in an "ego ideal" ("ideal self") as opposed to the
child's own current self-representation.Presumably the cathexis of
the ideal was thought to follow a path of development somewhat
similar to that followed by object-love. Living up to a libidinally
cathected ideal would then produce the same replenishment of
narcissism as would identifying with an admired or loved object.

Types of object choice

Based on his formulations on narcissism and object-love, Freud put

forward the idea of two main paths towards the ultimate choice of
an object, paths that also influence the type of object-relationship
reached by the individual (1914~).

1. The narcissistic path. One may love according to (a) the image of
oneself, (b) the image of what one was, (c)the image of what one
would like to be, or (d) the image of someone who was once felt
to be an extension of oneself (e.g. one's child).
2. The anaclitic (attachment) path. One may love (a) the woman
who has fed one or (b) the man who has protected one.

Although the superego was intended to incorporate and replace the con-
cept of the ego ideal, this was never completelyachieved, and the two concepts
never overlapped completely (Sandier, Holder, & Meers, 1963).
1 52 FURTHER ASPECTS

Freud has pointed out that these pathways also apply to the "suc-
cession of substitutes" who take the place of the original objects,
and also indicated that narcissistic object-choice is important in
the development of such conditions as homosexuality. Naturally,
"mixed" types are more frequently found than the "pure" types
listed above.
The theory of narcissism and object-love formulated during the
second phase was later to undergo profound changes, but subse-
quent formulations have their essential roots in the relatively
simplistic energic concepts of the second phase as described in this
chapter. In our view, later work on the concept of narcissism
and on such conditions as "narcissistic character disorder" cannot
be fully understood without taking Freud's first exposition of
narcissism and object-love into account.
CHAPTER ELEVEN

Limitations
and transition
to the structural model

'e remarked earlier that certain inconsistencies began to

be apparent towards the end of the second phase in
Freud's view of the mental apparatus and its function-
ing. These inconsistencies, which rendered the use of the topo-
graphical model difficult and limited in its clinical application, are
discussed below, under several different headings. They have been
devised with the advantages of the hindsight afforded by the de-
velopment of psychoanalysis since the structural model was
introduced in 1923. While limitations of the topographical model
are pointed out in this chapter, we would like to underline the fact
that the model was not completely replaced by the structural
model of the third phase of psychoanalysis. It has continued to be
applied where appropriate or convenient.
154 FURTHER ASPECTS

Difficulties in the use and meaning

of the term "Unconscious"

During the second phase the different meanings attached to the

term "unconscious" had become an increasing source of confusion
and imprecision. In a descriptive sense the term referred to a quality
of a mental state or a mental content, indicating nothing more than
that a particular mental "event" or process existed or occurred
outside conscious awareness. Used in the sense of a system, the
"Unconscious" indicated a specific topographical location within
the hypothetical mental apparatus, with events, contents, and pro-
cesses being assigned to it. The tenn was also used in a dynamic
sense to refer to mental contents that were being forcefully pre-
vented from reaching consciousness or motor expression, i.e.
were actively held in check by counterforces.Initially, the contents
of the Unconscious were taken to include everything that was
dynamically unconscious. The active "censorship" was located
only between the Preconscious and Unconscious. However, with
the introduction of the concept of a "second censorship" (Freud,
1900a)between the Preconscious and Conscious, it became evident
that many preconscious derivatives of the Unconscious could also
be regarded as being dynamically unconscious, while not being
located in the Unconscious. The dynamic quality of contents of the
Preconscious is evident in the examples relating to transference
and dreams in Chapters 8 and 9.
Freud's clinical experience had led him inevitably to the notion
of the second censorship, and to the attribution of dynamically
unconscious properties to some of the contents of the Preconscious.
But this was not consistent with the view that the chief character-
istic of the contents of the Preconscious was that, although descrip-
tively unconscious, they were "latent" and capable of reaching
consciousness by the process of turning attention towards them
(investing with "attention cathexis").
Freud became increasingly aware that the criteria of conscious-
ness and unconsciousness alone were unsatisfactory as a basis for a
psychoanalytic theory of mental functioning, for the differentiation
of distinct systems and organizations within the mental apparatus,
and for differentiating pathological states.The systems of the topo-
 LIMITATIONS AND TRANSITION 155

graphical model were originally formulated in accordance with

their hypothetical relation to consciousness, with the Preconscious
being closer to consciousness than the Unconscious. The distinction
between the Unconscious and the Preconscious was regarded as
being correlated with differences in their organization and modes of
finctioning, the Unconscious being characterized by primary pro-
cess functioning, the Preconscious by secondary process. In the
latter part of the second phase Freud was moving towards a
greater degree of "structuralization" of mental systems and pro-
cesses. Certain functional aspects of the mental apparatus that
would previously have been attributed to the Unconscious were
coming to be regarded as being "deeply unconscious", and this
played havoc with the idea of the orderly layering of the mental
systems according to their relation to consciousness. Thus, with
the introduction of the structural model in the third phase, Freud
commented that "we land in endless obscurities and difficulties if
we keep to our habitual forms of expression and try, for instance, to
derive neuroses from a conflict between the conscious and the
unconscious" (1923b, p. 17).

The problem of locating

the repressive forces

From a clinical and technical point of view the phenomenon of

resistance as an expression of defensive forces operating within
the mental apparatus became increasingly important during the
second phase. Surface manifestations .of psychological processes
were understood as compromise formations between instinctual
forces (in the form of drive-cathected wishes) originating within
the Unconscious on one side, and opposing forces on the other. It
was clear that these opposing forces operated outside conscious
knowledge and had thus to be included in the general category of
dynamically unconscious contents. But such forces were clearly
very different in nature from, and operating in a direction opposite
to, the instinctual forces in the Unconscious. There seemed to be no
alternativebut to allocate the repressive forces to the Preconscious,
1 56 FURTHER ASPECTS

but this led to the paradox that preconscious content included

forces that were not simply "latent" but were, in fact, accessible to
consciousness should attention be directed to them.
An attempt to solve this difficulty is evident in Freud's intro-
duction of the concept of the "second censorship", and we have
included this concept in previous chapters. But although we have
referred to the second censorship, as well as the first, as functions of
the Preconscious, in the topographical frame of reference the issue
of the precise location of the two censorships was never clarified by
Freud. What is clear is that, as the second phase progressed, the
problem of seeing the Preconscious as a highly organized system,
with some contents inaccessible to consciousness, led to major theo-
retical difficulties. This was particularly so as the term "precon-
scious" was also being used to refer to contents that were capable
of entering consciousness freely. As the range, complexity, and
specificity of the defensive forces described during the second
phase increased, the need to change the way in which they were
understood became urgent.

The problem of moral values,

conscience, and ideals

Freud's clinical experiences during the second phase led him to

realize the need for the recognition of what he said could only be
described as an "unconscious sense of guilt" (1923b). This was
especially manifest in the context of the forceful operation of the
individual's ideals, values, and conscience. There was no place
within the topographical model to accommodate such phenomena
in a satisfactory way. Ideals, values, and conscience always bear
the mark of the person's development in relation to external reality
and are organized under the influence of secondary process. How-
ever, aspects of these phenomena are often deeply unconscious in a
dynamic sense, whereas other aspects are readily available to con-
sciousness. Thus they have qualities of organization, have the
power to harness instinctual drive impulses, are only partly related
to instinctual drives, and cannot be assigned to any of the topo-
 LIMITATIONS AND TRANSITION 157

graphical systems. It became clear that they had to be regarded as

an expression of a way of functioning which could not be accom-
modated within the topographical theory.

The problem o f "internalization"

During the second phase the main clinical and theoretical empha-
sis was on the vicissitudes of instinctual drive wishes and their
derivatives. It was, of course, recognized that some of the contents
of the Preconscious and Conscious reflected the interaction of
the developing individual with the real ("external") world, but the
influence of the external world was not explored in a systematic
way. However, Freud did examine some of the issues in a number
of papers in the second phase, in particular in his discussion of the
reality principle (1911b), which referred to the need to take reality
into account in order to m o d e the pleasure principle, to avoid
danger, and to postpone instinctual gratification in the light of the
actual possibilities of gratification (as known to the individual).
Furthermore, as we have seen (Chapter I), he explored the role of
the child's ideals (1914~)~ which he saw as being profoundly influ-
enced by parental values and moral standards. The way in which
the external world was "taken into" the mind ("internalization")
was discussed with particular reference to the processes of (and
following) bereavement, normal mourning, and pathological de-
pression (1917e [1915]). Freud pointed out that, in the process of
mourning, the bereaved person may deal with the loss of a libidi-
nally cathected love object by a process of internalization, taking
on some of the characteristics of the lost love object by the process
of identification. Furthermore, in the state of melancholia, the be-
reaved person may cope with coexisting ambivalent feelings of
love and (unconscious)hate towards the lost object by identifying
with the object and consequently directing the reproaches (uncon-
sciously felt towards the object) towards the self in the form of
pathological self-reproaches. Even earlier, in the second phase,
Freud had described the process of identification and had shown
that the use of this mechanism could cause an absorption into the
158 F U R T H E R ASPECTS

ego (self) of aspects of important people in the individual's life, and

that this was of substantial clinical significance.It is clear that the
cathected image of the (presentor past) love object can be regarded
as being activated in one or more of all three of the "systems" of the
topographical model.

The problem of narcissism and the self

When Freud came to attempt to formulate his understanding of

psychotic phenomena (partly following the clinical interests of Karl
Abraham, Eugen Bleuler, and Carl Gustav Jung),he leaned heavily
on his second-phaseformulations of the libido theory. As described
in Chapter 10, he made use of the idea of a "hydraulic" balance of
libidinal investment between the ego (self) and object (other) in
postulating that, in "autistic" states that develop in the course of a
psychosis, there is a complete withdrawal of any libidinal invest-
ment in other people. (Bleuler had introduced the term "autistic" in
order to describe the withdrawn state of some adult psychotic
patients. It is not used here to refer to the condition later described
as "infantile autism".) The libido withdrawn from the (representa-
tions of) objects was considered to be reinvested in the represen-
tation of the person himself or, as Freud put it, in the person's own
ego. As we have shown in the previous chapter, this was con-
ceptualized as self-love, or narcissism (hence Freud's description of
psychoses as "narcissistic neuroses"). Phenomena such as megalo-
mania and delusions of grandeur were seen to be a consequence of
an excessive narcissistic libidinal investment. Conversely, the self-
lessness and self-depreciation of some lovers was thought to be due
to the bulk of the person's libido being invested in the representa-
tion of the loved person. (This view of the libidinal basis of the
unhappy feeling of unrequited love seems to have been based on
a highly simplified and peculiarly Victorian version of romantic
love.)
When Freud first formulated these ideas in a relatively system-
atic way (1914~)~ he did not deal with the problems of accommo-
dating such phenomena within the second-phase model. The fact
that the integration of his views on narcissism and object-love
greatly strained the topographical theory contributed to the need
to formulate a revised model of the mind. In retrospect it seems
inevitable that Freud was forced to move to a theory that allowed
for an organized structure within the mental apparatus which
could contain a "reservoir of libido" together with representations
of the person himself and of his objects.

The problem of anxiety

During the first two phases of psychoanalysis, anxiety was con-

ceptualized as a "derivative" of repressed libidinal wishes and
represented-particularly in the case of neurotic anxiety-the way
in which the repressed libidinal energy became manifest. It was
thought that this energy underwent a "transformation" so that it
was experienced not as a sexual wish, but as the unpleasant feeling
of anxiety, often without any ideational content being attached to it
("free-floating anxiety"). This so-called first theory of anxiety was
developed during the first phase of psychoanalysis and was origi-
nally expressed in terms of the transformation of affects rather than
of libidinal energy. In the first phase it was possible to contrast
neurotic anxiety with "realistic" anxiety (fear). Fear was seen as a
response to "external" danger situations (especially of being over-
whelmed or attacked), whereas neurotic anxiety was seen as a
response to a high level of internal affective excitation connected
with unacceptable sexual emotions that threatened to overwhelm
the individual. This first-phase theory of anxiety was retained dur-
ing the second phase, with the difference that it was repressed
libidinal energy-rather than quantities of affect-that was re-
garded as being transformed into anxiety.
The first theory of anxiety gave rise to problems about the
topographical location of, and conditions for, such transformation
and its relation to the three topographical systems. In particular, it
is difficult to conceive of why such transformed libido should be
experienced in ways that are so similar to the perception of exter-
nal danger. Towards the end of the second phase it became clear
160 FURTHER ASPECTS

that the idea of anxiety as the transformation of a libidinal drive

impulse fitted very uneasily into the topographical model.
With the introduction of the structural theory (1923) it became
possible to conceive of an agency that could respond with anxiety
to both external and internal danger situations (1926). These
responses might or might not reach consciousness. Just as an un-
conscious sense of guilt was difficult to conceive of in terms of
the topographical model, so was the phenomenon of unconscious
anxiety. In Freud's "second theory of anxiety", anxiety was re-
garded as having the function of a signal.It is sufficient to point out
here that the problem of conceptualizing anxiety was one of the
factors that contributed to the increasing unwieldiness of the topo-
graphical model (see Chapter 1 for a description of Freud's two
theories of anxiety).

The problem of aggression

a n d the self-preservative drives

In the first part of the second phase Freud regarded the drive
components of the Unconscious as sexual in nature. Although he
recognized the existence of aggressive impulses, these were ini-
tially thought to be part of the sexual drive, manifested, for
example, in sadism. Indeed, sexuality in general was thought to
contain elements of aggressiveness. Slightly later Freud postulated
the existence of "self-preservative drives" which could be in con-
flict with libidinal wishes?
Freud had difficulty in placing the concept of aggression within
the topographical theory, and this prompted him to allocate it to
the self-preservativeor "ego" drives, and to regard it as being non-
libidinal in nature (1915~).The problem of the degree to which
aggression could be considered as ''rea~tive'~ to frustration or irri-

' The self-preservative drives were also referred to as "egodrives"or "ego

instincts".The term "ego"referred to "consciousness"and "self"(in contrast to
"object")and included the repressive forces that protected consciousness from
being overwhelmed; it should not be confused with the "ego"of the structural
model of the third phase.
 LIMITATIONS AND TRANSITION 161

tation on the one hand, and as a "drive" on the other, together with
further difficulties posed by the drive theory, then led Freud to
give aggression equal status with libido. In 1920 he placed the
sexual and self-preservative drives under the heading of "life in-
stinct", and aggression was now no longer regarded as stemming
from the self-preservative drives.
Freud's clinical observation that people tend unconsciously to
repeat patterns of behaviour and experience that may be painful or
self-damaging led him to formulate (1920g)his concept of a "death
instinct" ("death drive", or Thanatos). He contrasted this with the
"life instinct" (Eros). In his final work Freud put it as follows:
After long hesitancies and vacillations we have decided to
assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the
destructive instinct. . . . The aim of the first of these basic in-
stincts is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them
thus-in short, to bind together; the aim of the second is, on
the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things. In
the case of the destructive instinct we may suppose that its
final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state. For
this reason we also call it the death instinct. [Freud, 1940a
[1938],p. 1481
Laplanche and Pontalis comment that the death instinct is ini-
tially directed inwards and tends towards self-destruction but is
"subsequently turned towards the outside world in the form of the
aggressive or destructive instinct" (1973, p. 97):
Clearly, the role of aggression in mental life was never satisfac-
torily dealt with within the topographical model. Nor could the
part played by the self-preservative drives be comfortably placed
within it. All of this added to the problems faced by Freud in
regard to his model of the mental apparatus, culminating in its
drastic revision in 1923.

While most psychoanalysts accepted the "dual-drive"theory, fewer were

convinced of the value of what Freud regarded as a speculative excursion into
the theory of the death instinct, most analysts taking the view that the notion
of an aggressive drive was sufficient for clinical purposes. It seems clear that
Freud's ideas about the death instinct, expressed in Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple (1920g), were to some degree a consequence of his experiences of the First
World War.
 PART v

Third phase:
the structural
frame of reference
CHAPTER TWELVE

Characteristics

e have seen that the influence of clinical psychoana-

lytic findings on Freud's thinking during the second
phase, 1897-1923, was profound, and the need to make
appropriate theoretical adjustments, particularly during the latter
half of the phase, placed an increasing degree of strain on the
topographical model. In Part IV we described some of the prob-
lems that led Freud, in The Ego and the Id (1923b), to propose the
structural theory, with its division of the mind into id, ego, and
superego. The present chapter introduces the structural frame of
reference by way of a discussion of the changes in theory repre-
sented in Freud's structural model. Chapter 13 deals with the
major third-phase "structures" or "agencies", and with the inter-
action between them.
One of the most important changes embodied in the structural
theory was a shift away from the emphasis on the "movement from
the depths to the surface" perspective characteristic of the second
phase. Freud had always been very aware of the importance of
current and past adaptations to external reality (increasingly so
166 THIRD PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

after the introduction of the reality principle in "Formulations on

the Two Principles of Mental Functioning" in 1911b).Nevertheless,
psychoanalysis in the second phase saw behaviour and subjective
experience as being predominantly surfacederivatives of instinctual
wishes arising from the Unconscious, wishes that were modified
on their way through the Preconscious as they moved towards
overt expression. In the second phase, partly as a response to
Freud's "discovery" that the traumatic memories of his hysterical
patients were frequently none other than wish-fulfilling sexual
daydreams, psychoanalysis placed much greater emphasis on ad-
aptation to impulses arising from within the individual than on
stimuli impinging from the external world. The mental apparatus
tended to be seen as an instrument that had developed primarily to
harness the drives. This perspective was amended in the third
phase with the introduction of the structural theory, and the
relative weight given to external reality was much increased.
Moreover, while the structural model of the mind was equally
concerned with the vicissitudes of sexual and aggressive drives, it
placed more emphasis than before on the functions and structures
that delay and alter drive expression. However, in spite of the
major changes introduced by the structural model, the basic psy-
choanalytic assumptions remained unchanged. Freud was again
concerned with the organization of a mental apparatus, although
its new structural entities were not primarily based upon the
relationship of mental processes and contents to the quality of
consciousness or unconsciousness. The assumption of unconscious
mental functioning remained basic to psychoanalytic thinking,
and the distinction between conscious and unconscious processes
was as crucial as ever. The same held true of the assumptions of
psychological determinism, psychological adaptation, and of psy-
choanalysis as a general psychology.'

Freud probably intended the structural model to replace the topographi-

cal, but in later years often he formulated his thoughts in t e r n of the topo-
graphical theory. Gill states "that in their basic conception these two sets of
systems are not as different as is sometimes assumed" (1963, p. 3), although
Arlow and Brenner have maintained that "the topographical and the structural
theories are neither compatible nor interchangeable".They go on to say that "it
is actually disadvantageous to use the terms of the two theories interchange-
 CHARACTERISTICS 167

Although the third phase, formally initiated by the introduc-

tion of the structural theory, dates from 1923, it is clear that the idea
of the structural organization of the mental apparatus was implicit
in Freud's previous writings. The concept of "ego", in spite of
several changes of meaning, had always implied some sort of
organization, and in the latter part of the second phase Freud had
begun to speak of "the structure of the ego" (1914~~ 1916-17)) while
in the two monographs, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) and
Group Psychology (1921~)~ Freud certainly perceived the ego as a
complicated structure within the mental apparatus. The concept of
the superego is foreshadowed in the description of that part of the
ego "which rages against itself" in melancholia (1917e [1915]).The
id concept follows from some of the radical revisions (referred to in
the previous chapter) made towards the end of the second phase,
particularly in relation to the theory of aggression (see 1917e
[1915], 1920g). After The Ego and the Id, further additions to the
structural theory were made, particularly in Inhibitions, Symptoms
and Anxiefy (1926d [1925]), in which Freud proposed his com-
pletely revised theory of anxiety.
We want to emphasize that in what follows we present a sche-
matic and simplified account of the structural model in the form of
a structural frame of reference, as was done for the affect-trauma
theory of the first phase and the various versions of the topographi-
cal model of the second phase. In our structural frame of reference,
inconsistencies and variations are eliminated in order to present a
"rounded-out" picture. It should be noted that the removal of cer-
tain contradictions and ambiguities will not do justice to some of
the subtleties of the model as used by Freud at various points
between 1923 and the end of his life in 1939; however, we believe
that the approach presented here is of value in comprehending the
writings and contributions of the third phase.

ably and to speak of the id, the ego and the superego in one breath and of the
Unconscious, the Preconscious, and the Conscious in the next" (1964, p. 3). It is
our view that the topographical and the structural models overlap in many
respects, and that one cannot entirely replace the other. However, in the present
state of knowledge and theory formation, there is no single all-embracing
psychoanalytic model of the mind.
168 T H I R D PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

An overview of the structural frame of reference

The mental apparatus is regarded as being entirely composed of

the three structures id, ego, and superego, each having very special
properties and functions, "Structures" in this context refers to
large-scale enduring (but to some extent modifiable) organiza-
tions-what Gill (1963) has called macrostructures. For our present
purposes we can take a view of the relation between the structural
and topographical frames of reference as given in Figure 12.1. The

The mental apparatus

descriptively unconscious

I system I EXTERNAL
I Preconscious
I I I
I I I I
I I I I
I I 1 I
I I I I

V)

I
c
s
-*
a
2
r?
a
Structure Id Structure Ego S
and a
Structure Superego $
FIGURE 12.1. A representation (more-or-less)of the relation between the
topographical and structural frames of reference (see text).
 CHARACTERISTICS 169

Superego

unconsciousness

FIGURE 12.2. The relationship between the ego and the three "agen-
cies" with which it has to deal (consciousness is regarded as a
sense-organ of the ego). The external world is 'unconscious' in that it is
only known via the ego's conscious or unconscious perception.

relationship between id, ego, superego, and the external world is

shown schematically in Figure 12.2.
Some of the characteristics of the structural frame of reference
are listed below.

1. The id is regarded as the reservoir of the instinctual drives and

wishes (particularly childhood sexual and aggressive wishes)
as well as of repressed contents held back by the ego through
the application of counter-forces. Id contents are entirely un-
170 THIRD PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

conscious, and they are knowable only through their surface

derivatives (dreams, slips of the tongue, transference manifes-
tations, etc.).
2. The superego is the organized psychic representative of the
parental authority figures of childhood, distorted in particular
by the child's early phantasies. This mental agency functionsas
the individual's conscience and is also the vehicle for ideals
derived from the parents and, through them, from society. It is
regarded as a mental agency equal in status to the other two
psychic institutions, and it is responsible for the unconscious
sense of guilt that is regarded as playing an extremely impor-
tant role in both normal and pathological mental functioning.
While a great part of the superego is profoundly unconscious,
aspects of it are represented in the form of conscious standards
and ideals.
3. The ego is seen as a structure that develops largely to cope with
the demands and restrictions of external reality and to mediate
between the drives, reality, and, later, the superego. Faced with
conflicting demands from the id, external world, and superego,
the ego makes use of its problem-solving and synthetic capaci-
ties-+~ well as of the mechanisms of defence-to deal with
these demands and conflicts.
4. The interaction with the external world is given greater status
than before. In a way the external world can be regarded as
being like one of the "agencies" of the structural model, with the
same status as the superego and the id. In this sense it equally
makes "demands" on the ego and can be a profound source of
intrapsychic conflict.
5. Conflict is now seen as occurring between all the pairs of
agencies: between id and ego, id and superego, id and external
world, superego and ego, superego and external world, and
ego and external world.
6. "Censorship" is no longer seen as the erection of a barrier on the
border between two systems, but as a function of the ego.
7. The parts played by anxiety, guilt, and the pain of loss gain very
much more emphasis in this new frame of reference. The re-
vised theory of anxiety no longer treats anxiety as a transforma-
 tion of libidinal drive energy, but sees it rather as a signal of
danger arising within the ego.

It is appropriate to end this brief introduction to the structural

frame of reference with one of Freud's comments in the New Zntro-
ductoy Lectures:
And here is another warning. . . . In thinking of this division
of the personality into an ego, a superego and an id, you will
not, of course, have pictured sharp frontiers like the artificial
ones drawn in political geography. We cannot do justice to the
characteristics of the mind by linear outlines like those in a
drawing or in primitive painting, but rather by areas of colour
melting into one another as they are presented by modem
artists. After making the separation we must allow what we
have separated to merge together once more. [1933a, p. 791
The following chapter deals in greater detail with the three
major "agencies" of the structural frame of reference.
CHAPTER THlRTEEN

The three agencies

The superego

hen Freud introduced his theory of narcissism in

1914, he formulated the idea of an ego ideal, which
represented internalized parental standards and ex-
pectations, including culturally determined ideals conveyed
through the parents. If the child could live up to the ideal, it would
re-experience the early narcissistic gratification of being at one
with the parents. The conscience was seen as a separate but related
self-critical organization which functioned to motivate the child to
conform to the standards and precepts of the ego ideal. At this time
Freud distinguished clearly between the "ego ideal" and the "insti-
tution of conscience", which he saw as "an embodiment, first of
parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society" (1914c, p.
96). Impulses that come into conflict with the person's cultural,
ethical, and moral values are defended against by repression,
which "proceeds from the self-respect of the ego . . . [the person]
has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego
 THE THREE AGENCIES 173

[self]. . . . For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the condi-
tioning factor of repression" (1914~~ pp. 93-94).
In "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917e [1915]), Freud stated
that in melancholia the ego "rages against itself" (p. 257) and in-
dicated that the critical part of the ego is the conscience. While he
did not explicitly refer to the ego ideal in that paper, he made it
clear, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921~)~that the
conscience had been absorbed into the term "ego ideal". Now the
ego ideal was seen as a critical and punitive organization within
the ego; and in 1923, in Freud's presentation of his structural
theory, the ego ideal is unambiguously referred to as the superego,
with a much increased emphasis on the critical and self-punitive
aspects of this agency. Although the term "ego ideal" was replaced
by "superego" in The Ego and the Id, Freud occasionally reverted to
the use of the term (e.g. in "The Economic Problem of Masochism"
in 1924, and New Introductory Lectures in 1933). Doubtless this re-
flected some unease in Freud's mind about the absorption of the
ego-ideal concept into the superego.'
The superego can be regarded as a mental "agency" (lnstanz)or
"structure" that has, during the course of the individual's develop-
ment, been differentiated off from the ego and the id. In relation
to the ego it functions like an internal judge and critic, observing
the ego, creating and presenting ideals to it. The superego is
thought to have developmental precursors in the ego functioning
of the pre-oedipal child, and is therefore initially part of the ego-
"a differentiating grade in the ego", as Freud called it ( 1 9 2 1 ~ p.~
130). These precursors in the ego are eventually formed into a
discrete structure that influences mental functioning in interaction
with the ego and the id. It consequently affects many processes
within the mental apparatus and, in turn, puts its imprint on the

This is borne out by the fact that a number of subsequent authors

suggested a clear differentiation between the ego ideal as a structure and
the superego be made, with ego ideal being regarded as more benign than the
superego. Later the pressure for differentiating the ego ideal as a separate
structure lessened, with the conceptualization of the superego as having
friendly, supporting, and loving aspects in addition to critical ones. The view
that the superego is more than a critical agency has thrown new light on
socalled superegoconflict.
174 THIRD PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

behaviour of the individual. The superego in this frame of refer-

ence should be considered as a relatively rigid structure, in
contrast to the ego and the id, both of which have a higher degree
of flexibility.
The introduction of the superego concept marked a substantial
move away from a predominant interest in drive psychology and
added a new dimension to the understanding of intrapsychic con-
flict. Conflict had been seen, within the topographical frame of
reference, essentially in terms of the vicissitudes of instinctual
drives, and insufficient weight had been given to internalized pa-
rental wishes and expectations. With the introduction of the
superego, this situation changed?
A portion of the external world has, at least partially, been
abandoned as an object and has instead, by identification,
been taken into the ego and thus become an integral part of the
internal world. This new psychical agency continues to carry
on the functions which have hitherto been performed by
the people [the abandoned objects] in the external world: it
observes the ego, gives it orders, judges it and threatens it
with punishments, exactly like the parents whose place it has
taken. We call this agency the superego and are aware of it in
its judicial functions as our conscience. [1940a [1938],p. 20513
Freud saw the formation of the superego as a consequence of
the resolution of the Oedipus complex-he called it the heir to the

In Chapter 3 we described Freud's view of the opposition between moral

values on the one hand, and unacceptable wishes and feelings on the other. At
that time Freud did not consider the role of moral values as having a constant
regulating function in the internal world. With the advent of the structural
theory the regulatory function of the superego was all-important.
' Although the superego is thought of as the agency of conscience and
ideals, prescribing rules, regulations, aims for mental activity, and modes of
behaviour, its contents are not thought to be abstract codes. On the contrary,
superego contents can be envisaged as representations of the interaction be-
tween oneself and others, i.e. internalized object relationships. It is thought
that the contents, therefore, are based on memories of other people making
demands or requirements or imposing prohibitions on certain of the person's
activities or wishes. For example, breaking the law may be associated, con-
sciously or unconsciously, with the image of a policeman or judge representing
the law.
Oedipus complex-but, as we have just indicated, there are pre-
oedipal precursors to the crystallization of the superego. We know
that the little child has to learn to obey rules and injunctions, but
at first the child only follows these in the actual presence of the
parents or those who represent parental authority. Gradually the
child begins to comply with the rules out of love for the parents
and fear of their disapproval or punishment. This developmental
step is conceptualized in terms of internalization. The need for the
presence of the external authority figures fades, and compliance
appears to be at the behest of what we think of as an intrapsychic
personification of those figures. Although processes of internaliza-
tion occur from early on and come to exist as contents of the ego
and the id, the formation of the superego as a structure is classi-
cally thought to occur at a time when the child is attempting to
master the conflicts and anxieties of the Oedipus complex. The
child, realizing its longings for the exclusive possession of each
parent, finds itself in an intolerable conflict of loyalty, love, and
hate. This confusion of feelings requires the development of a
strong controlling mental agency, which in effect mutes or brings
about repression of the urges towards the parents.
In other words, as a consequence of the child's intense feel-
ings resulting from prohibited oedipal wishes, the painful conflict
over hostile and loving feelings towards the parents is resolved
by the child by identifying with them, i.e. their prohibitions are in-
ternalized.' The structural theory provided further scope for the
integration of a developmental point of view into the psychoana-
lytic conception of the mental apparatus, which was not now
restricted to systems linked to qualities of consciousness or uncon-
sciousness.
With the introduction of the superego concept came the differ-
entiation of the idea of an unconscious sense of guilt.Guilt feelings in
the form of self-reproaches had previously been seen by Freud as of
importance in the pathology of obsessional neurosis (190%) and in

Freud pointed out that "a child's superego is in fact constructed on the
model not of its parents but of its parents' superego; the contents which fill it
are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting
judgements of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from
generation to generation" (1933a, p. 67).
176 T H I R D PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

the genesis of melancholia. Now Freud drew attention to what he

called a "negative therapeutic reactiono--a clinical phenomenon in
which a deteriorationin the patient's condition occurs following an
encouraging experience in which the analyst remarked on an im-
provement in the patient's condition and the patient's realization
that there had in fact been a step forward. Freud saw this as the
outcome of an unconscious sense of guilt at the progress made.
Improvement is experienced as a threat and arouses guilt because
the move forward gratifies an unconscious repressed infantile wish
that is felt by the patient to be forbidden-for example, symboli-
cally overthrowing father by succeeding where he had failed, thus
gratifying an oedipal wish about which the patient feels guilty. The
negative therapeutic reaction represents an attempt to undo the
fulfilment of the guilt-arousing wish.5
The structural theory established unconscious guilt feelings as
a central aspect of superego functioning and as a major motive for
defence on the part of the ego. Freud asks the question: "How is it
that the superego manifests itself essentially as a sense of guilt (or
rather, as criticism-for the sense of guilt is the perception in the
ego answering to this criticism) and moreover develops such ex-
traordinary harshness and severity towards the ego?" (1923b, p.
53). Freud answers by suggesting that the harshness that can be
shown by the superego is a result of the channelling of part of the
id's destructiveness through the superego. He comments:
The dangerous death instincts are dealt with in the individual
in various ways: in part they are rendered harmless by being
fused with erotic components, in part they are diverted to-
wards the external world in the form of aggression, while to a
large extent they undoubtedly continue their internal work
unhindered. [1923b,p. 541
Nowadays, however, we would understand the severity of the
superego as being in substantial part a consequence of the projec-
tion of the child's aggression onto the parental representations that

Subsequently there has been a substantialliterature on the negative thera-

peutic reaction, in which factors other than an unconscious sense of guilt are
regarded as operative (seeSandler, Dare, & Holder, 1992,pp.121-132).
 THE THREE AGENCIES 177

enter into the formation of the superego. The role of unconscious

guilt feelings is now generally recognized as being of great impor-
tance in the development of psychopathology. Although we have
emphasized the unconscious aspects of the superego, there are
other aspects-ideals, morality, personal standards, and values-
that can be quite conscious. Indeed, like the ego, the superego
functions along the whole continuum from profoundly uncon-
scious to readily conscious awareness.

The id

From the point of view of the structural frame of reference the

contents of the id can be regarded as more-or-less identical with
those of the Unconscious (the dynamic Unconscious) of the topo-
graphical frame of reference (although large parts of the ego and
superego are descriptively unconscious). However, the context in
which the id is placed in the mental apparatus is different from the
place of the Unconscious in the topographical frame of reference,
mainly in the id's specific dynamic relations to ego, superego, and
reality.
Freud described the relation between the Unconscious and the
id as follows:
You will not expect me to have much to tell you that is new
about the id apart from its new name. It is the dark, inacces-
sible part of our personality; what little we know of it we have
learnt from our study of the dream work and of the construc-
tion of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative
character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego.
We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a caul-
dron full of seething excitations. We picture it as being open at
its end to somatic influences. . . . It is filled with energy reach-
ing it from the instincts [drives], but it has no organization,
produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about
the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observ-
ance of the pleasure principle. The logical laws of thought do
not apply in the id, and this is true above all of the law of
contradiction. Contrary impulses exist side by side, without
178 T H I R D PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

cancelling each other out or diminishing each other: at the

most they may converge to form compromises under the
dominating economic pressure towards the discharge of en-
ergy. There is nothing in the id that could be compared with
negation. . . .There is nothing in the id that corresponds to the
idea of time; there is no recognition of the passage of time, and
. . . no alteration in its mental processes is produced by the
passage of time. [Freud, 1933a, pp. 73-74]
Freud went on to say that
Wishful impulses which have never passed beyond the id:
but impressions, too, which have been sunk into the id by
repression, are virtually immortal; after the passage of decades
they behave as though they had just occurred. [1933a, p. 741.
The id shows no evidence of ego-like functioning and is thus
incapable of controlling and accepting delay of immediate satis-
faction of needs; nor does the "seething cauldron" of the id show
any superego-like qualities. It does not involve any value judge-
ments-as Freud put it, "no good and evil, no morality"(l933a, p.
74). The id functions to give drives psychological representation.
This occurs via the investment of freely mobile instinctual energy
in memory traces, and at any one time the psychological content of the
id can be regarded as consisting of unsatisfied instinctual wishes seeking
satisfaction or gratification.
Freud saw the id as undergoing increasing restriction of its
tendency to direct gratification of instinctual wishes during the
course of development, as ego and superego become organized,
effective structures. The wishes of the id are more and more
pressed into expressing themselves in sufficiently disguised,
altered, and more acceptable form. Nonetheless, the id, like the
Unconscious of the topographical theory, continues to function
solely under the dominance of the pleasure principle.
In Chapter 5 we described in some detail the nature of the
instinctual wishes regarded as making up the contents of the Un-

Vreud refers here to the controversial concept of so-called primal repres-

sion. (For a detailed discussion of the functioning of the id, see Max Schur,
1966.)
 THE THREE AGENCIES 179

conscious. Everything described there can be included in the de-

scription of the id? We also described at some length how the
processes in the Unconscious are characterized by primary process
functioning, and this applies equally to the characteristics and
functioning of the id.
One way or another the wishes that arise in the id find expres-
sion within the ego in (descriptively) unconscious and conscious
instinctual derivatives (e.g. daydreams), and in action. The drives
themselves are regarded as intrinsically unknowable.
An instinct can never become an object of consciousness--only
the idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the uncon-
sciouss,moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise
than by an idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or
manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing
about it. When we nevertheless speak of an unconscious in-
stinctual impulse or of a repressed instinctual impulse, the
looseness of phraseology is a harmless one. We can only mean
an instinctual impulse the ideational representative of which
is unconscious, for nothing else comes into consideration.
[Freud, 1915c, p. 1771
Any one impulse can give rise to a variety of derivatives, and
conversely, a number of different instinctual wishes may express
themselves in one and the same derivative. An enormous number
of different drive derivatives is possible, so that the person has
available in principle a large repertoire of potential forms of drive
expression and gratification. The fate of the derivatives of the id is
not determined by the id itself but by the ego and the superego.
From the point of view of the id its ultimate aim is the gaining of
satisfaction of instinctual drive demands, but it has no direct access

'In Chapter 5 we included, for didactic purposes, aggression alongside

libido as an instinctual drive in the topographical frame of reference.We noted
then, however, that aggression was only given the status of an independent
instinctual drive when Freud postulated that the aggressive drive was a deriva-
tive of a biologically based death instinct (Thanatos).The death instinct was
said to exist alongside the life instinct (Eros).Many analysts disagree with this
formulation, which Freud himself recognized as being entirely speculative.
Freud here makes use of the noun "the unconscious"to refer to "all that
is, descriptively speaking, unconscious".
180 T H I R D PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

to executive apparatuses. We can say that the id has no control over

which of its contents press forward for satisfaction. Whichever
instinctual wish may be involved, in its path towards gratification
it presents itself to the ego, where in its unmitigated form it will
cause conflict (e.g. because of superego standards and demands).
As a consequence it will either be rejected or modified by the ego
into a derivative acceptable to both ego and supereg~.~
With the evolution of the structural theory, developmental no-
tions became much more intrinsic to Freud's vision of the mental
apparatus. The ego and the superego, in particular, were conceived
of as structures appearing and evolving in the course of develop-
ment. The id, too, is subject to developmental and maturational
changes. From the maturational side there are the biological
changes that give rise to the unfolding sequence of instinctual
development from orality to adult genitality (see Chapter 1).On
the other hand, the variety of experiences in the course of life,
together with repressed ideational content, introduce ever-chang-
ing objects and modes of satisfaction of the drive impulses (i.e.
instinctual wishes) into the id. As development proceeds, the bal-
ance between the ego and id shifts as the ego becomes more and
more capable of controlling and delaying instinctual drive de-
mands.
The structural theory retains the energic concepts introduced
during the first phase of psychoanalysis, and amplified during
the second phase. This is shown by the notion of the id as the
source of power for the mental apparatus; that is, it is thought
of as the structure in which instinctual demands and needs find a
first psychic representation and serve to activate the rest of the
mental apparatus. In this way, the id, as well as functioning as a
source of a wide range of instinctual wishes, is also seen as the
source of the dynamic power that is controlled by the ego and
the superego.

The terms "derivative"or "instinctual derivative"refer to any modified

form of the original instinctual wish, whether or not it is allowed to proceed
without change to consciousness or motor expression.
 THE THREE AGENCIES 181

The ego

The ego as an agency is central to the structural frame of reference.

Unlike the terms id and superego, the term ego was in use by
Freud from the earliest days of psychoanalysis. Its meaning under-
went changes over the years before the publication of The Ego and
the Id in 1923, and the change at that point was, in major ways, a
radical one. Nevertheless, Freud (as with many other of his con-
cepts) maintained earlier meanings of the term at various points in
his subsequent writings. Accordingly, it is useful to refer to aspects
of the development of the concept in order to understand its usage
adequately.1°
The early meaning of ego, as exemplified in the Studies on Hys-
teria (Freud, 1895d) and in Freud's book on dreams (1900a),was a
rather diffuse one. It represented a group of ideas present in con-
sciousness.On the other hand, the ego was also regarded as having
the capacity to exclude some of these ideas from conscious aware-
ness because they were unacceptable. Thus the ego at that time had
certain defensive functions attributed to it." Furthermore, in other
contexts the term referred to the person as a whole.
During the second phase tremendous theoretical advances
were made, but to a significant degree Freud de-emphasized
the ego as a concept during that phase. Exceptions were Freud's
studies on narcissism and on mourning and melan~holia.~~ In the
paper "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914~)~ Freud stressed

lo For a systematic overview of the development of the ego concept, see

Hartrnann (1950)and Rapaport (1959).

l1 In the first phase, Freud's notion of defence was that it was directed

against the reexperiencingof specific memories and, equally, against the expe-
riencing of some aspects of reality. In the early idea of defence, Freud referred
to quantities of affect that were dammed up, rather than, as later, to drive
energies. The function of defence in this phase was that it prevented the recol-
lection and re-encountering of some emotionally charged reality experience,
thereby avoiding the arousal of an unpleasant conscious experience. The
dammed-up affect was regarded as being transformed into anxiety if it forced
its way into consciousness.
l2 During the first part of the second phase, Freud also emphasized the role
of the "ego instincts" ("ego drives") that had a self-preservativefunction. They
were seen as being responsible for the ego's protection.
182 T H I R D PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

the notion of the ego as an object (self) that, just as other persons,
could be loved or have love (libido) withdrawn. Following this
personification of the ego we see an increasing "structuralization"
of the concept, as in "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917e [1915]),
where Freud writes of a "splitting" of the ego into two parts, in
which one part of the ego is conceived of as a self-critical part, i.e.
as the individual's conscience (as described earlier in this chapter
in the discussion of the superego).
In the third phase the concept of the ego was extended as part
of the new structural theory, and Freud now spoke of the ego as an
active agency of the mental apparatus, an active participant in conflict
with the other agencies and the external world. As Freud later put
it:
We are warned by a proverb against serving two masters at
the same time. The poor ego has things even worse: it serves
three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims
and demands into harmony with one another. . . . Its three
tyrannical masters are the external world, the superego and
the id. [1933a, p. 771
In this frame of reference the ego is seen as a coherent organiza-
tion of mental processes, powered by "neutral" energies employed
in the carrying out of its a~tivities,'~
and which is distinguished by
being able to organize and to integrate different aspects of the
person's experience and capacities. Consciousness is no longer re-
garded as the property of a surface system, as in the topographical
model, but rather as a sense-organ of the ego. The ego is no longer to
be equated with consciousness, as it once was. The id and superego
have access to consciousness only via the ego."

Freud saw the energies belonging to the ego as being "neutral" and
derived from the drives during the course of development. In this context
Freud spoke of "desexualization" of libido (1923b, p. 30).Freud's formulation
was extended by Hartmann (1950),who introduced the concept of "neutraliza-
tion" to cover both the desexualization and "deaggressivization" of instinctual
energies. From the point of view of the structural frame of reference we can also
conceive of energies intrinsic to the ego from the outset. This theoretical issue is
now not as important as it once was.
l 4 The concept of the Unconscious is not part of the structural model.

However, the term "the unconscious" has continued to be used either in the
sense of the Unconscious of the topographical model (i.e. with more or less
 The structural ego is now defined mainly through its functions.
These are primarily control over perception and activity, on
the one hand, and control over drive impulses and wishes, on the
other. Because the ego serves "three mastersu-id, superego, and
the external world-it follows that a superordinate function is
the achievement of adaptation to the demands placed upon it,
demands that are often conflicting. Such adaptation can take many
forms, and it frequently involves the use of mechanisms of defence
against unacceptable wishes and impulses and the creation of what
have been called compromise-formationsbetween conflicting de-
mands.
"Censorship" is no longer seen as the erection of a barrier on
the border between two mental systems, but as a function of
the ego which evaluates mental contents, especially unconscious
wishes and their derivatives, in terms of criteria of acceptability
to consciousness, or in terms of the threats of danger they arouse.
The ego employs the mechanisms of defence not only to repress
but also to modify unacceptable unconscious wishes or demands
from any source (including the external world). In a sense, we can
say that a major function of the ego is to protect consciousness
from unpleasant experiences. For this purpose it makes use of the
anxiety signal, which is an indication to the ego that the uncon-
scious wish or impulse heralds a threat (seen by Freud as being in

the same meaning as the id of the structuralmodel) or, more commonly, to refer
to everything that is, in the descriptive sense, unconscious (i.e. the id and major
aspects of the superego and the ego, and it embraces, for example, preconscious
contents and mental mechanisms such as defences).One source of the confu-
sion is Freud's statement, when he introduced the structural theory in The Ego
and the Id, that "We recognize that the Ucs. does not coincide with the re-
pressed; it is still true that all that is repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is
repressed. A part of the ego, too-and Heaven knows how important a part-
may be Ucs., undoubtedly is Ucs. . . . And this Ucs. belonging to the ego is not
latent like thePcs.; for if it were, it could not be activated without becomingcs.,
and the process of making it conscious would not encounter such great difficul-
ties" (1923b, p. 18).SubsequentlyFreud wrote of "the unconscious" rather than
using the abbreviation Ucs., which referred to the system Unconscious of the
topographical theory. He also continues to use the term "preconscious", as in
his statement that "The inside of the ego, which comprises above all the
thought-processes, has the quality of being preconscious" (1940a (19381,p. 162).
184 THIRD PHASE: THE STRUCTURAL FRAME

particular the threat of castration or loss of love), ultimately a

threat to the ego of being traumatically overwhelmed, of being
helpless in the face of overpowering and uncontrollable excitation
(for a discussion of the theory of anxiety see Chapters 1and 10).15
Another important function of the ego is reality testing-with-
out which, survival would be impossible. It is the capacity to
distinguish sufficiently between experiences aroused by stimuli
coming from the internal and external worlds (e.g. between imagi-
nation and perception).I6

The structural model of the third phase provided the basis for
so-called classical psychoanalytic thinking for many years after
Freud's death in 1939, as reflected in the works of the ego psycholo-
gists hart ma^, Kris, and Loewenstein, and in the developmental
psychoanalysis of Anna Freud. To a significant extent it is still
a major influence on psychoanalytic conceptualizations, although
there are indications that nowadays its suitability as the psychoana-
lytic theory of the mind is being increasingly questioned (see, for
example, B r e ~ e 1994).
r

l5 It is interesting to note that affect, which had been so important in the

first phase, again became of importance in the third phase, although the roles of
affect are vastly different in the affect-trauma and structural frames of refer-
ence. Freud, as well as many subsequent psychoanalytic authors, have had
much difficulty with the notion of unconscious affect and feelings, but the
introduction of the idea of an unconscious sense of guilt (Freud, 1923b)and of
anxiety as a signal to the ego (1926d [1925])opens the way for psychoanalysis
to accept the concept of unconscious feelings.
l6 The subsequent psychoanalytic literature contains references to a variety
of ego functions. Among these we can list imagination, memory, cognition,
synthesis and integration, control of motility and perception, and the capacity
to anticipate actions-in general, adaptation to external reality and to the inner
world.
A final word

I
t would not be unexpected if the reader of this book had
experienced a certain amount of frustration because relatively
little has been said about developments in psychoanalysis
since Freud; and indeed the reader may well ask why this was so.
We can only respond by saying that the raison d'2tre of the work has
been to provide a basis for understanding and working with later
psychoanalytic formulations.
The contents of this book do not represent psychoanalytic
theory as it is today. Nevertheless, we are convinced that it is
necessary to return to the roots of the psychoanalytic theory of
mental functioning, and that a historical approach is vital for
putting into perspective the continuously changing post-Freud
psychoanalytic approaches. For example, current views on object
relations and narcissistic pathology cannot be fully appreciated
without a knowledge of Freud's views on such basic concepts as
narcissism and transference. In essence, our aim has been to con-
tribute towards a developmental approach to the understanding of
the labyrinth of present-day theoretical viewpoints.
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Sandler, J., Person, E. S., & Fonagy, P. (1991). Freud's "On Narcissism":
An Introduction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schur, M. (1966).The Id and the Regulatory Principles of Mental Function-
ing. New York: International Universities Press.
Stem, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic
Books.
Stem, D. (1995). The Motherhood Constellation. New York: Basic Books.
Sulloway, F. J. (1979).Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoana-
lytic Legend. London: Burnett Books.
Waelder, R. (1960). Basic Theory of Psychoanalysis. New York: Interna-
tional Universities Press.
Wallerstein, R. S. (1988). One psychoanalysis or many? Int J. Psycho-
Anal., 69: 5-21.
Zilboorg, G.(1941). A History of Medical Psychology. New York: W. W.
Norton.
INDEX

Abraham, K., 28,158 and self-preservative drives,

abreaction (catharsis), 15,42 16&161
acting out, 3,25,83,107 and sexuality 28,160
actual neurosis, 16 theory of, revisions to, 167
adaptation(& 62 agoraphobia, 62
concept of, 60 Alexander, E,32
to external world, 24 ambiguity intolerance of, 90
to internal forces, 24 anaditic (attachment) path of object
psychological, 36,166 love, 151
adolescence, 24,134 anaclitic relationship, 147
affect(s) anal erotism, 23
charge of, 42 anal phase, 22,23
development of, in Preconscious, Anna Freud Centre, xi
93-94 Anna O.,14
affect-trauma frame of reference, xvi, anxiety:
7,4134 attacks, 53
and concepts of neurosis, 50-54 castration, 24
and defences, 46-47,68 free-floating, 159
development of, 12-17 Freud's theory of:
external events, as instigators of first, 93,94,119,159,160
pathology 41 second, 93,94,160
mental apparatus in, 43-47 neurosis, 16,51,53,54,159
and mental energy, 44-45,180, problem of, 159-160
181 realistic, 159
and mental trauma, 48-50 signal, 94,160
and pathogenic processes, 47-48 unconscious, 160
and progression to second phase, attachment, 147,148,151
57-59,62,74 attention, cathexis, 74,75,99,106,127,
schematic representation of, 45 133,154
aggression, 25,61 autism:
and death instincts, 176,179 infantile, 158
as ego-drive, 143 meaning of term, 158
as instinctual drive, 74, 179
projected: Balint, M., xiv
child's, 176 basic assumptions, of Freud's
in transference, 115 theoretical structure, 31-38
 194 INDEX
basic rule, free association as, 24
Bergman, A., 22
Bernheim, H., 13,15
Bibring, E., 17,74
Bionian school, xiv
bisexual impulses, infantile, 25
Blwler, E., 158
borderline personality disorders, 142
Bowlby, J., xiv
Brenner, C., 32,184
Brentano, C. von, 17
Breuer, J., 14,15, 17, 116
Briicke, E., 17
Burgner, M., 148
castration anxiety, 24
catharsis, 15,42
cathexis, 90,144
aggressive, meaning of term, 74
attention, 75,106,127,133
investment with, 74,99,154
de-, of objects, 144
drive, 138
energic investment, 142
hyper-, of self, 144
of ideal, 151
instinctual, 75
drive, 123,131,137
mobile, 78,79
libidinal:
meaning of term, 74
narcissistic, 148
of object, 142,143, 146-148,149
of self, 143,144,146, 148
libidinal investment, 23
meaning of term, 23,74
of memory traces, 78
narcissistic, 144
residual, 146,147
of object, 142
causality, 17,32,90, 127
principle of, 37
censorship, 81,183
as barrier between Pcs. and Cs.,26,
67,68,98
dream, 120,122,124, 126,128,129,
137,138
first, 85,124,131-133
as function of ego, 6,170
of instinctual wishes, 63,68-70,75,
76,85,104
and preconscious scanning, 91
preconscious, 91,100
second, 69,89,98,106,114,
123-127,129,132,133,137,
138,154,156
Charcot, J. B., 12, 13,30
charge of affect, 42
childhood, 121,151
events:
effect of, 50
phantasies about, 18,19
recovery of, 18
memories:
recovery of, 103-117,137
as wish-fulfilments, 82
and object-love, 148
objects of, instinctual wishes
towards, 103
psychological organization in, 43,
49
psychosexual phases of, 22
role of in development of adult
mental processes, 31
sexuality, 22,61
concept of, resistance to, 2
sexual seduction in, 16,59
as cause of neurosis, 18,50
phantasies about, 19,117
sexual wishes, revival of, role of in
neuroses, 116
trawna in:
pathogenic, 19
phantasies about, 30
clinical experience, role of in creation
of theory, 12
coitus interruptus, 16,53
compromise-formation, 61, 62,89,183
Compton, A., 74
condensation, 85,104,123
meaning of term, 79
conflict:
mental, 34
psychological, 48
and self-preservation,61
as source of disequilibrium, 36

conscience, 27,151,156-157,172-174,
182
superego as, 170,172
Conscious system (Cs.), 3,21,27,
64-71,96100, 111
see also Preconscious; Unconscious
conscious and unconscious parts of
mind
division between, 14
consciousness:
vs. attention, 97
control of access to, in
Preconscious, 93
and dream-work, 123,124,129
ego as,44,143,160, 182
and free association, 134
psychological quality of, 64
psychology of, 1
qualities of, 97,166,175
as sense-organ of ego, 28,44,91,
182
vs. unconsciousness, 14, 154
constancy:
libidinal object-, 148
principle of, l7,44
continuity 33
contradiction, absence of, in mental
functioning,80
conversion, 52
Cs.: See Conscious system
Dam, C., xi, xii, 3,25,57,103,108,
176
dayd.eam(s),18,30,61,70, 83,92,94,
97,100,132,179
consdous, 88
wish-fulfilhg, 20,59,74,77,86,88
sexual, 166
day's residues, 120,125,129,132,134,
137
death instinct (Thanatos), 26,33,161,
176,179
decathexis, of objects, 144
defence(s), 16,36,42,43,44,52,100,
105,113, 129,134, 176, 181,
183
mechanisms, 27,28
against instinctual drives, xvi
INDEX 195
use of, in Preconscious, 94
process of dissociation as, 14
against quantities of affect, 47
repression as, 46
substitution as, 46
transformation of affect as, 47
delusions:
of grandeur, 158
of persecution, 47
depressive position, 23
derivative(s),131
activities, 88
of anal erotism, 23
of Conscious, 83,115
daytime, in dream, 130
of death instinct, 179
drive, 87,93,94
of id contents, 170,179
of instinctual wishes, 69,70,83-88,
93,99,100,129,157,166,183
aggressive, 76
censoring of, 91,124,126,132
childhood, 82
meaning of term, 83,180
and neurotic symptoms, 95
perceptual repmentation of,
137,179
preconscious, 76,78,104,105,
120,125
repression of, 94,159
transformation of, 94,180
meaning of term, 180
of Preconsdous, 83,86,115
pl'hlary pl'OIXSS, 83,117
transference, 126
in Conscious, 106115
in Preconscious, 104-106
of the Unconscious, 70,71,75,76,
81,115,117,118
censoring of, 91
preconscious, 154
determinism, psychological, 17,
32-38,166
meaning of term, 36
disequilibrium, 44,47
displacement, 17,45,81,85,90, 104,
123,131,146,150
meaning of term, 78-79
196 INDEX
dissociation:
as defence, 13,14,44,45,46,52
as organic weakness, 14
process of, active aspect of, 14
dream(s):
analysis of, 18,20,59,76,81,117,
118
and Freud's self-analysis, 18
content, latent, meaning of term,
125
facade, 128
formation of, process of, 119-
138
and free association, 24
Freud's study of, 18
function of, 118-119
manifest, 125
processes, 116-138
source, 120
theory of, in terms of
topographical model, 3
-work, 120-138,177
Dreher, A. U.,xv, 5,49,116
Drews, S.,49
drive(s) [see also instinct(s)]:
component, 72
death (Thanatos),161
instinctual, role of, 22
meaning of term, 22
partial, 72,143
-psychology, xvi
psychoanalysis as, 22
self-preservative, 16Cb161
sexual vs. aggressive, 72
theory, 161
dynamic viewpoint, 31,154
economic viewpoint, 31
Edgcumbe, R., 148
Edith Ludowyk-Gyomroi Trust, xii
ego, passim
as agency in structural frame,
181-184
boundaries, 145
development of, 150
development of theory of, 6
-drive, 143,160,181
ideal, 25,149-151,172,173
meaning of term, 149,173
instinct(s),61,143,160,181
meaning of term, 27,44,143,160,
167,170,181
psychology, xiii, xvi, 11,29
psychoanalytic, development
of, 11
role of in Freud's structural
theories, 27-28
structure of, 167
Ellenberger, H. ', 11
energy:
binding of, 90
bound, 99
Freud's psychological views
formulated in terms of, 17
instinctual drive as, 73
mental, 44-45
mobile, neutral, 99
psychic, 99
binding of, in Preconscious,
92-93
discharge of, 119
Freud's concept of, 73
Erikson, E., "epigenetic" theory of,
23
Eros, 161, 179
external world:
internalization of, 157
meaning of term, 92
Fairbairn, W. R. D., xiv
father, perverted acts towards child
by, 19
Ferenczi, S., 28
first theory of anxiety, 93,119,159
fixation, instinctual, meaning of term,
77
Fliess, W., 18
Fonagy, P.,142
Foundation for Research in
Psychoanalysis (Beverly
Hills, CA), xi
free association, 15,24,37,68,106,
111,116,120,127,134
Freud, A., 29
developmental psychoanalysis of,
184
Freud, S., passim
on aggression, 25
concepts of, 4
terminology of, 3
on dreams, 116-118
early history of, 12-16
early influences on, 16-17
metapsychology of, 1,31
on neuropsychoses of defence, 14
on psychoanalysis:
as discipline, 1
as science, 4-5
psychoanalytic psychology of, 1,
26,30,33-36,41-43,57,58,
74,92,101
on psychosexual development,
23-26
theoretical models of, 4-8
theories of:
development of, 3,ll-29,30-31,
41
first phase: affect-trauma,
12-17,30,41-54,57-59,62,
68,167,180,181,184
second phase: topographical, 3,
18-30,36,49,54,57-138,
141-143,152,153,158,160,
165,166,167,180,181
third phase: structural, 18,25,
26-30,36,44,58,143,149,
165-184
writings:
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 26,
28,59,161,167
"The Economic Problem of
Masochism", 173
The Ego and the Id, 6,18,26, 141,
167,173,181,183
"Formulations on the ?kro
Principles of Mental
Functioning", 58,60,166
Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego, 167,173
Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety, 26,28,93,167
"Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes", 4
Thc Interpretation of Dreams, 20,
58,63,117,118,122,124,141
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
Analysis, 19,58
"Mourning and Melancholia",
173
"On Narcissism: An
Introduction", 58,142,149
New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Annlysis, 171, 173
"A Note on the Unconscious in
Psycho-Analysis", 58
An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, 28
"Project for a Scientific
Psychology", 16
The Psychopathology of Euerydny
Life, 22,76
"Remembering, Repeating and
Working-Through", 33
Studies on Hysteria, 14, 101, 181
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, 22,58,142
Gay, P.,11
genetic approach, 31,32
genital primacy in puberty 24
Gill, M. M., 6,31,92,168
Grunberger, B., 142
guilt, 47,107, 119, 170,176
unconscious sense of, 27,156,160,
170,175,176,177,184
Guntrip, H., xiv
hallucination, 52,83,97,127,138
of fulfilment of dream wish, 119,
123,130
Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic
(now The Anna Freud
Centre), Index Project, xi
Hartmann, H., 29,181,182,184
Helmholtz, H. L. E von, 17
Herbart, J. F., 17
heredity, 13,48,49
Holder, A., xi, xii, 3,25,57, 103, 108,
151,176
Holt, R. R., 92
Holzman, l? S., 33
homosexuality, 152
hypercathexis of self, 144
 198 INDEX

hypnosis, 13, 14,15 meaning of term, 22

hypochondriasis, 16,27,47 repressed, 179
hysteria, 14,16,19,50,51,52 unconscious, 179
conversion, 48 instinctual needs, 177
origin of, 13 instinctual regression, 77
instinctual wish(es), passim
id, passim censoring of, in Preconscious, 91
role of in structural frame, 27-28, derivatives of, 69,70,83-88,93,99,
169,177-180 100,129,157,166,183
as source of disequilibrium, 36 aggressive, 76
ideal ego, 150 censoring of, 91,124,126,132
ideals, 156-157 childhood, 82
ideal self, 149, 151 meaning of term, 83,180
ideational content, 75 and neurotic symptoms, 95
ideational input, scanning of, in perceptual representation of,
Preconscious, 91 137, 179
identification, 157 preconscious, 76,78,104,105,
imaginative products, construction of, 120,125
in Preconscious, 94 repression of, 94,159
incest, memories of, as phantasies, 19 transformation of, 94,180
instinct(s)[see also drive(s): infantile, 76, 80,103,105, 121,129,
instinctual, role ofj: 130
component, 73,74,143 meaning of term, 22
death (Thanatos),26,33, 161,176, primary process transformation of,
179 82
ego, 61,181 unsatisfied, 72
life (Eros), 161,179 integration, failure of, dissociation as,
meaning of term, 22, 60-61 14
part, 143 internalization:
theory, 22,25 of external world, 157
instinctual derivative(s),179 of parental values, 175
meaning of term, 180 and ego ideal, 172,174
instinctual drive(& passim [see also and superego, 175
drive(s);instinct(s)] problem of, 157-158
concept of, 60-61 Isaacs, S., 88
energy, 83,84,93,111,121,131,
137 James, W., 73
Freud's theory of, 142 Janet, I?, 13
meaning of term, 22/73 Joffe,W.G., 143
instinctual energy, 59,74,75,78,79, Jones, E., 11,28
89-93,99,105,178,182 Jung, C. G., 28,158
meaning of term, 74
instinctual fixation, 77 Kemberg, O., 142
instinctual gratification, 62,75, 76,83, Klein, M., 23
103,157 Kleinian school, xiv
(drive discharge), 75 Kohut, H., 142
instinctual impulse(s), 60 [see also Kohutian school, xiv
drive@);instinct(s)] Kris, E., 2, 184
Kuhn, T., 12
Lacanian school, xiv
Laplanche, J., 23,24,161
latency:
meaning of term, 24
phase, 24
latent dream content, meaning of
term, 125
libido, 75,142-151,158-161,182
meaning of term, 25,54,74
and neurotic anxiety, 28
life instinct (Ems), 161, 179
macrostructures, 168
Mahler, M. S., 22
manifest content of dream, 128
masochism, 26
masturbation, 16,24,47,52,53
Maudsley Hospital, xi, xv
meaning, 33
Meers, D., 151
megalomania, 158
melancholia, 27, 143, 157,167, 173,
176,181
memory(-ies):
systems, organization of, in
Preconscious, 91-92
traces, 43,45,49,73,74,78,83,91,
178
traumatic, recovery of repressed,
77
wish-fulfilments as, 59
mental apparatus.
in affect-trauma frame of
reference, 43-47
disequilibrium in, 44
existence of, 43
meaning of term, 35
organization of, 57-71
structures or agencies of, 27-28
mental energy, 44-45
mental functioning:
characteristics of, 79-81
unc~ll~cious, 34-35
mental systems, interrelation of,
68-71
mental trauma, 48-50
metapsychology, 6
meaning of term, 1,58
Meynert, T., 12
moral values, 156-157
mother:
as child's first erotic object, 148
relationship with, 23
motivation, concept of, 32
mystic writing-pad, 99
Nagera, H., 80,88,92
narcissism, xv, 25,27,172,181, 185
concept of, 141
primary, 144-146
problem of, 158-159
residual, 146-148
secondary, 144,148
narcissistic path of object love, 151
narcissistic pathology, 185
narcissistic personality disorders, 142,
152
negation, 80,89,134, 178
absence of, in mental functioning,
80
defence mechanism of, 129
negative therapeutic reaction,
meaning of term, 176
neurasthenia, 16,51,52,53
neurosis(-es), 22,53, 116
actual, 16,47,51
aetiology of, 16,155
anxiety, 16,51,53,54
concept of, 50-54
genesis of:
role of childhood trauma in, 20
role of sexuality in, 15,18,19
major, 51,52
narcissistic, 158
obsessional, 16,51,52,53,175
psycho-, 16,20,51
psychoanalytic treatment of, 42
traumatic, 51
psychogenic, 51
object:
choice, types of, 151-152
-love, 141-148,151,152,159
meaning of term, 142
200 INDEX

object (continued): 88,89,157,177,178

relations, 185 meaning of term, 21
and nutrition, 23 -unpleasure principle, 75
theory, 29,142 PoincarC, H., 86,87
obsessional neurosis, 16,51,52,53, Pontalis, J. B., 23,24, 161
175 pre-adolescence, 24
oedipal phase, 24 preconscious, meaning of term, 156,
Oedipus complex, 25,32,76,175 183
dissolution of, 24 Preconscious system (Pcs.), 3, 21, 26,
resolution of, 174 64-71,82-95,98,124
oral phase, 22,23 characteristics and functions of,
84-95
paranoia, 27, 144, 147 meaning of term, 67-68
paranoid-schizoid position, 23 role of, 82
parapraxis, 83,99 see also Unconscious system
parents, internalization of, 24 preconscious thoughts, 130
pathogenic processes, 47-50 "pressure" technique, 15
pathology, role of external events in, primary narcissism, 145
41 primary process, 21,27,78-85,89,90,
pavor noctumus (night terrors), 53 100,104,117,123-124,126,
Pcs. See Preconscious system 129,131,155,179
Perelberg, R., xii primary undifferentiated pleasure-
Person, E. S., 142 self, 145
perversion, 22 principle of constancy, 17,44
phallic-oedipal phase, 22 processes, pathogenic, 47-50
phallic phase, 23 projection, 20,94,105,176
phantasy(-ies),42,92,93, 106, 107, preconscious, 94
115,120,131 psychic equilibrium, 64
in analysis, 102 psychic organization, meaning of
childhood, 18,170 term, 35
sexual, 117 psychoanalysis:
of childhood sexual seduction, as general psychology 33-34
18-20 meaning of term for Freud, 33
conscious (daydream), 88 training in, aims of, 6
vs. fantasy(ies), 88 psychoanalytic psychology, Freudian,
infantile, 116 1,26,30,33-36,41-43,57,58,
interpretation of, 128 74,92,101
preconscious, 85,105,130 psychoanalytic theory:
transference, 105, 110 cornerstones of, 32-33
repressed, 88,89 emotionally based resistance to, 2
of seduction, 19 historical approach to, importance
unconscious, 87,88 of, 185
meaning of term, 88 as theory of therapy 1
wish-fulfilling, 77, 88, 94, 100 psychological adaptation, 36
phobia(s), 52,53,62 psychological determinism, 36-38
Piaget, J., 12 psychoneuroses, 16,20,51
Pine, P., 22 psychosexual development, Freud's
pleasure principle, 27,37,60,80,84, theory of, 22.23
 INDEX 201

psychosis, 158 functioning, 89-96

puberty, genital primacy in, 24 secondary revision, 125,127,128,
130
Rank,O., 28 second theory of anxiety 160
Rapaport, D.A., xiii, 11,31,33,35,181 self:
rationalization, 94 -analysis, Freud's, 18,20,30,59
preconscious, 94,105 ideal, 149
reality: meaning of term, 143
disregard of, in mental -preservative drives, 61
functioning, 80 problem of, 158-159
external, adaptation to, 165 sexual abstinence, 16
"historical" (objective) vs. sexuality:
"psychical", 20 and aggression, 28,160
principle, 21,37,60,80,88,89,92, childhood, 22,61
100,105,157 concept of, resistance to, 2
psychic, in mental functioning, 80 importance of, 32
testing, 6,96 role of, in neurosis, 15,18,19
in Preconscious, 92 sexual seduction, in childhood, 16
regression: memories of, as phantasies,
in analytic setting, 104 18
formal, 77 shame, 47
meaning of term, 77,122 slip of tongue (parapraxis),22,69,
temporal, 77 79,99,115,170
topographical, 77 Stem, D.,23,94
repetition compulsion, 20,33 structural frame of reference, xvi, 3,
repression, 14,20,30,32,46-48,50, 7,41,143
52,67,69,70,76,81-85,88, characteristics of, 165-171
93,98,113,136,172-175 development of, 26-31,85,91,
as defence, 46 118,155,160
primal, 178 and external world, 36,169
repressive forces, problem of locating, overview, 168-171
155-156 three agencies of, 172-184
resistance, 3,16,25,26,27,32,108, see also ego; id; superego
110,117,138,155 and topographical frame, relation
interpretation of, 70 between, 168
to psychoanalysis, 2 transition to, 15b161
Rosenfeld, H., 142 sublimation, 25,59,88
meaning of term, 59
sadism, 160 subliminal perception, 85
Sandler, A.-M., xii substitution, 52,102
Sandler, J., xi, xiii, xv, xvi, 3,5,25,49, as defence, 46
57,80,88,92,96,103,108, Sulloway, F,J., 11
116,142,143,151,176 superego, passim
Schur, M., 178 role of in structural theory, 27-28,
secondary elaboration, 127,130 170,172-177
secondary process, 21,78,86,100, as source of disequilibrium,36
104,123-127,133,134,138, symbol formation, 79
155,156 symbolism, verbal, 88
202 INDEX
symbolization, 79,123,126
meaning of term, 79
visual, 127
symptom(s),neurotic, construction of,
in Preconscious, 95
symptomatic acts, 22
systems, boundaries between, 68-71,
83
talking cure, 14
Target, M., xii
terminology:
current psychoanalytic, 2,3,8
Freudian, 3
historical basis of, 2,3
Thanatos, 26,33,161,176,179
thought(s), 86, 87,99
time, sense of, 90
timelessness, of mental functioning,
79
topographical frame of reference [see
also ego; id; narcissism;
object-love; superego], xvi, 3,
7,36,41,49
and Conscious system, 65,66,
68-71,96-100
stimulus barrier to, diagram of,
98
see also Conscious system
development of, 1&25,54
dream formation, process of,
119-138
dreaming, function of, 118-119
and dream processes, 116-138
limitations of, 26,153-161,
165166,174
mental apparatus, organization of,
57-71
mental systems, interrelation of,
68-71
mind, "topography" of, 63-64
and Preconscious system, 67-68,
82-95
characteristics and functions of,
84-89
and secondary process
functioning, 89-95
see also Preonscious system
schematic representations:
relation to consciousness/
unconsciousness, 66
of "systems" of the mental
apparatus, 65
and transference, 101-115
derivatives of, in Conscious,
106-107
derivatives of, in Preconscious,
104-106
wish towards therapist,
development of, 111
and Unconscious system, 65-66,
7241,177-183
and instinctual wishes, 75-77
mental functioning (primary
process) within, 78-81
see also Unconscious system
transference, xv, 3, 15, 16,25,33,76,
83,116,117,126,130-132,
135,154,185
as clinical phenomenon, 101-115
derivatives:
in Conscious, 106-115
in Preconscious, 10P106
meaning of term, 101-103
preconsaous, interpretation of, 106
transformation of affect, 159
as defence, 47
trauma, 19,20,30,33,42,43,48-51,
62,117,121
current, 49
external, as cause of
psychopathology, xv, 13,17
meaning of term, 49
mental, 48-50
retroactive, 49
role of in origin of
psychopathology, 14,16
as source of disequilibrium, 36,47
traumatic neurosis, 51
Ucs. See Unconscious system
unconscious
meaning of term, 3,26,32,66,154,
182
changes in, 3
role of, 32

unconscious and conscious parts of
mind, division between, 14
unconscious mental content, vs.
system Unconscious, 26
unconscious mental functioning,
34-35
unconscious mind, Freud's concept
of, 17
unconscious phantasy, meaning of
term, 88
unconscious wish(es), meaning of
term, 121
unconsciousness, 65,66,154,175
deep, 155
quality of, 65
Unconscious system (Ucs.), 21,22,25,
26,32,64-71,72-81
dynamic, 3,177
meaning of term, 65-68,154-155
mental functioning within, 78-81
vs. unconscious mental content,
26
see also Preconscious system
INDEX 203
University College London,
Psychoanalysis Unit, xi
University of London Institute of
Psychiatry, xi, xv
vertigo, 53
Vienna, socio-cultural context of and
origins of psychoanalysis, 12
Waelder, R., 33
Wallerstein, R. S., xiii-xvi
Winnicott, xiv
wish(es):
instinctual, passim
censorship of, see censorship: of
instinctual wishes
derivatives of, see derivatives:
of instinctual wishes
unconscious, meaning of term, 121
working through, 25
Wutke, J., xii
Zilboorg, G., 11,13