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IT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS brief communication to explore some of the roots of the interest in the negative as they emerge in the history of ideas in the 1930s in France and how they influenced the development of French psychoanalysis.1
The interest in negation as a concept goes back to Genesis (see Kuzzick, 1979 for a detailed historical review); the concept itself permeates a considerable body of philosophical discourse ranging from Heraclitus to Montaigne, Pascal, Descartes, Kant to name but of a few of the of the major writers on the topic.
The list of analysts who were interested in the "negative" would have to start with Freud. Though he did not devote a full length paper on the topic until 1925, his earlier works are peppered with references to the concept.
The Interpretation of Dreams addresses the question of the absence of "no" in the unconscious and how the negative comes to be represented in the manifest dream. In a footnote, Freud relates this to the antithetical meaning of primal words. The representation of an element in a manifest dream by its opposite is also a factor in the construction of jokes. Freud remarks (1905, p. 175) that in the unconscious, no process that resembles judging occurs "In the place of rejection by a judgement what we find in the unconscious is repression." Thus for Freud at this time, repression is