Me or my double? Love or self-love? Life or death?
The processes that characterize the unconscious, aren't met with in the system above it: the preconscious. The preconscious is the stream of memories and perceptions to which the conscious has ready to access. For example, when I alight upon a single face in the midst of a rapidly streaming crowd, I pass from preconscious to conscious perception. The preconscious designates what is actually present, to the mind. Together they constitute the secondary process of mental life. (This reminds me working memory?)
*Cathexis: the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.
*Pleasure Principle (German: Lustprinzip): is the instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs.
*Reality Principle (German: Realitätsprinzip): is the ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and to act upon it accordingly, as opposed to acting on the pleasure principle.
*Economic Model of the Psychic: keeping tension at an optimal level.
(Example: eating too much candy and stomach ache)
There are two processes in the unconscious which bring contents to conscious expression: displacement, condensation.
Displacement is an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new object for goals felt in their original form to be dangerous or unacceptable. (Example: someone having a bad day at work and quietly accepting the criticism of higher-ups then going home and taking out anger and frustration on family members rather than focusing on how to fix the problems at work.)
Condensation is when a single idea or dream object stands for several associations and ideas.
The phenomenon of "condensation" according to Freud is the result of two or more incidents of displacement. Condensation is when displacements merge and fuse (or condense) together.
We never know the unconscious other than through its disguises.
Removing a person from a room does not do away with him: the unconscious idea continues to exist after its repression.
Dreams and jokes reveal the intrusions of the unconscious as a common source of everyday laughter.
If repression fails, neurotic illness will break out.
In dreams, we can have the cake we just ate.
Faulty reasoning is another technique by which the joker makes use of deviations from normal thinking within the situation to achieve humor.
The laughter the jokes generate punctures the inhibiting seriousness of the external world's demands.
Negation (Verneinung ): denotes a mental process in which the subject formulates the content of an unconscious wish in a negative form. The content of the wish finds expression in consciousness, yet the subject continues to disown it. (Patient's act of censoring, an unconscious thought may be revealed in. The content of a repressed idea or thought can get through to consciousness, on the condition that it is "negated." A negation paradoxically acknowledges a thought or feeling by disowning it.)
*The figure in the dream is not my mother, so it is his mother, authorship over patient's words: not very ethical :)
The symptoms of hysteria, and indeed of all neuroses, take root in precisely this condition of doubleness. In the case of hysteria, the impulse the hysteric doesn't want to know is forced to make itself known by means of physical disguise or, in Freud's terminology, somatic conversion.
Unheimlich: Unhomely: smoke seems out of place
"The uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression".
Love is the most basic and inescapable way in which I (re)appear to myself as uncanny.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality- The Finding of an Object - There are good reasons why a child sucking at his (Freud doesn't specify the child as male, he uses gender neutral word kind) mother's breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a 're'finding it. Loving as an adult, involves recognition of the prohibition separating parental from sexual love.
Transference: Freud had observed that in clinical treatment, repressed impulses of love, hate and fear would repeat themselves in distorted form as 'impulses toward the analyst'. Drives are apt to be transferred from one context to another. When we say of our friends that, 'they always go for the same kind of people' or 'make the same mistakes in their relationship', we are taking note of just this phenomenon.
Because we never 'found', or fully possessed, our object in the first place, the process of 'refinding' it, or indeed transferring it, is never really fulfilled. Love is the reappearance, in disguise, of its previous disguises.
On Narcissism - Three Essays says that the mother is the infant's first and exclusive object of desire, the theory of narcissism suggests a rival is in place before she comes on the scene - the infant himself. What drives self-love in its earliest form is self-preservation. A baby's first forms of auto-erotic indulgence is notably sucking of his thumb and lips. Baby becomes its own erotic object, that is, an object worth looking after.
Fundamental activity of death drive: the compulsion to repeat. Freud's observation of his own grandchild: 'fort-da' game, repetitive reenactment, the trauma of separation of his mother, passive to active. By shifting from object to subject of the traumatic experience, we diminish, and distance ourselves from, its power to damage us.