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The chapter maps out the deconstructive contestation of the death penalty undertaken in this period, one which, it shows, proceeds by mobilizing survival as a critical concept undercutting the phantasm of something “worth more than life” found at the heart of the theological-political logic of the death penalty. Freud is shown to provide ...
Nov 7, 2018 · In his ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death’, written in 1915 and in the midst of the First World War, Freud reflected on the bonds that hold a community together as well as the destructive powers that break those bonds (Freud 1915b). By the time he develops the death drive, first in 1920 and then more fully in the following decade, he becomes increasingly concerned with the ...
- Primal Repression vs Repression Proper
- ‘Pushed Down ’ vs. ‘Pulled Under’
- Banishment vs Return
- Successful vs Failed
Freud distinguished ‘primal repression’ from ‘repression proper’ on three grounds. The first distinction was that primal repression played a central role in establishing fixation whereas repression proper affected “mental derivatives of the repressed representative or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, had come into associative conne...
The second binary in Freud’s concept of repression pertains to the repressed contents coming to reside in the unconscious because anti-cathexis or counter-cathexis has ‘pushed’ them down there or because pre-existing contents (e.g., those subject to ‘primal repression’) have ‘pulled’ them down there. The two pathways, upon closer scrutiny, seem to ...
The third dichotomy in Freud’s 1915 repression paper involves the fate of the material that undergoes repression. According to Freud, two outcomes are possible: (1) it is banished from consciousness, or (2) it returns to consciousness. Far from being simple, each of these outcomes has varied forms. Banishment that might lead to the instinct become ...
When it comes to the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of repression, Freud has the following to say: Leaving aside the circular reasoning in the last portion of this passage, it seems that Freud is equating repression’s ‘success’ with ‘banishment, ’ and ‘failure’ with ‘return of the repressed’. If that were so, my assertion of this fourth binary in his disco...
- Salman Akhtar
- salman.akhtar@jefferson.edu
- 2020
In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written in the aftermath of World War I, Freud speculated that there existed death drives in conflict with sex drives. This opposition, he thought, could explain much about the fundamental forces shaping individuals and societies, while also pointing toward explanations for their self-destructive and outwardly aggressive behavior.
The concept of repression changed after Freud's death. Psychologists interpreted the idea as forgetting painful memories. That was not Freud's conception, except at the very beginning of his career, as Boag (2006) points out. Freud started out with a "forgetting painful memories" version of repression in the 1880s.
Freud and his colleagues came to Massachusetts in 1909 to lecture on their new methods of understanding mental illness. Freud lectured in German from notes and later published these talks for a popular audience. Those in attendance included some of the country's most important intellectual figures, such as William James, Franz Boas, and Adolf ...
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This chapter tracks Freud's principal paper on repression (1915b), addressing, in turn, the conceptual puzzle raised by repression, the course of repression, and its psychological cost. The paper seeds Freud's later paper on negation, which provocatively illustrates a conscious equivalent of repression and offers an illuminating reconceptualization of the pleasure and reality principles.
