The Perception of Reality and the Disavowal of Meaning

Freud had already pointed out in 1895 in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” that in order to prevent the generation of excessive anxiety one must be able to defend oneself not only against unmanageable aspects of instinctual stimulation, but also against reexperiencing or recalling potentially traumatic perceptions from the external world. He called attention to what he believed to be the significant differences between these two types of mental contents which necessitated a corresponding difference in the nature of the respective defenses against each of them. Instinctual derivatives (endogenous stimuli) posssess no sensory quality of their own and gain it only by their association with the mnemic residues of external sensory perception. Should a striving for drive gratification threaten unpleasure, its access to motor discharge or secondary-process thought can be blocked by repression, i.e., preventing the union of instinctual derivatives with perceptual mnemic traces that are necessary for its access to thought and to motoric gratification. This does not obtain in the case of external perceptions because Freud believed they were part of conscious experience, essentially endowed with characteristics of sensory quality, and, therefore, once registered in memory, capable of directly seeking expression by exciting the system conscious (system omega) again. Freud retained this operational formulation when he later postulated and developed the concept of a mental apparatus, reaffirming it essentially unchanged, for example, in “The Ego and the Id” (1923a).

A previous communication (Basch, 1975) reviewed the model of the mind developed in the “Project” (1895) where Freud postulates that it is essential that every stimulus capable of appropriately exciting the sense organs be