You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Only believers, who demand that science shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views. We may take comfort, too, for the slow advances of our scientific knowledge in the words of the poet:
«Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken.
…
Die Schrift sagt, es ist keine Sünde zu hinken!1
The term clandestinity defines the operation of keeping hidden something from someone, more than the content of what is hidden. Clandestinity doesn't exist in the Freudian lexicon, even as a definition. Unconscious is not only secret in its contents, but also clandestine in its capacity to influence the subject's action. The specification of defensive clandestine characteristics permit them to be distinguished from defense mechanisms better known and definite as disavowal and repression. Freud used the term disavowal in a specific sense for fetishism and the psychoses and «it consists in the subject's refusing to recognise the reality of a traumatic perception» (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, 117). «Repression, strictly speaking, is an operation whereby the subject attempts to repel, or to confine to the unconscious, representations (thoughts, images, memories) which are bound to an instinct» (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, 389).
Simona Argentieri (2000, 159-160) describes bad faith as a condition in some ways close to clandestinity, «the acting out of “multiple” functions of various “systems” of the patient's identity; relatively coherent at close range, but absolutely incoherent