The Thing for Freud and the Freudian Thing

“The thing” is not only a science-fiction film some of you may have seen years ago, in which an undescribable, nameless, impossible thing, coming from outer space, was threatening and destroying a group of men from the inside, in an Arctic country, as a sort of metaphor of the death drives. It is also a Freudian concept which is usually ignored by the psychoanalytic community at large, but which has been picked up by Jacques Lacan in his attempt to return to Freud-that is to say, to provide us with a structural reading of Freud in which each concept is to be understood in reference to the whole system, as well as to its successive transformations within the system. This attempt by Lacan has been followed by its logical and epistemologica! counterpart: to formalize the whole system up to its ultimate mathematical foundations-the mathemes, which are sort of mathematical units.

In this paper I simply wish to introduce you to a very little known and generally forgotten Freudian concept, “the thing,” or, as it is called in German, “das Ding,” which is the word I will use for reasons that will appear below. “Das Ding” appears in two texts: The Project for a Scientific Psychology, written in 1895, and the brief but extremely important text, “On Negation,” written thirty years later in 1925. The first text, far from being reduced to a sort of ultimate neopositivist will, written by Freud as a farewell to the ideals of Brücke, Helmholz, or Dubois Reymond, can preferably be understood as a physiological fiction which contains most of the main concepts of the still to be invented metapsychology. Some of these concepts are the inertia principle, primary and secondary processes, pre-conscious and unconscious, urge (poussée) toward the fulfillment of desire, hallucinatory or real fulfillment of desire, and inhibition as an ego function. All of these are to be found in the Project, whereas “On Negation” can be understood as the myth of the birth of the subject, by which I mean the