Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

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Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings Page 34

by Sigmund Freud


  59. [‘Simplicity is the seal of truth.’]

  60. [‘Catharsis’ in its psychotherapeutic sense is defined in the OED as follows: ‘The process of relieving an abnormal excitement by re-establishing the association of the emotion with the memory or idea of the event which was the first cause of it, and of eliminating it by abreaction.’ See also the opening sentences of Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through, and the relevant note.]

  61. [Angstlichkeit – this being the standard German word for ‘anxiety’ (see above, note 3).]

  62. [See the explanatory passage in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, above, p. 65.]

  63. [The ‘momentous event’ that Freud is alluding to is the ice age. The idea derived originally from Ferenczi. See also The Ego and the Id, above, p. 125.]

  64. [See On the Introduction of Narcissism, above, p. 28.]

  65. [Gegenbesetzung. The Standard Edition misleadingly renders this as ‘anticathexis’.]

  66. [See the OED quotation from a 1927 English translation of Laforgue: ‘In an earlier work I have defined scotomization (or the forming of mental “blind spots”) as a process of psychic depreciation, by means of which the individual attempts to deny everything which conflicts with his ego.’]

  67. [See The Ego and the Id, above, pp. 108f.

  68. [See The Ego and Id, Chapter V, opening pages.]

  69. [See ‘Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen’ (‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’, 1894).]

  70. [See above, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, note 9.]

  71. [See Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter II, closing paragraphs.]

  72. [See above, p. 219.]

  73. [See above, pp. 207f.]

  74. It may well quite often happen that in a danger situation that is quite correctly perceived as such by the subject, his objective fear is compounded by an element of fear relating to his drives. In such an event the drive whose demands the ego so fearfully shrinks from gratifying is probably a masochistic one, namely the destruction drive directed against the subject's own person. Perhaps it is this additional element that accounts for those cases where the fear reaction ends up being excessive, counter-purposive and paralysing. Phobias with regard to height (windows, towers, precipices etc.) may well have the same origin. Their covert feminine significance is closely related to masochism.

  75. See ‘Trauer und Melancholie’ [‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 1917; see especially the opening paragraphs of the essay].

  76. [Freud discusses this in rather more detail in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter IV.]

  77. [This, too, is more amply discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter IV.]

  78. [See the opening pages of ‘Trauer und Melancholie’ (‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 1917).]

 

 

 


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