February 1960: Displacement. Cogitations

Painful feelings related to a situation that has immediately arisen are displaced – for example, feelings of rejection, i.e. of rejecting and being rejected. The true self is felt not to be wanted nor yet to want the other true self; something must be done with these feelings. They are entertained, but the subject of the thoughts is no longer felt to be the person, someone in the past, who has immediately stimulated them, and around that person there is spun out a web of hostile reverie. Such past objects are carefully preserved; maybe they are specifically created for that purpose in the first instance. Note that the painfulness of the feeling is largely increased by the feeling that the rejection is of a true self and cannot therefore be assumed to be capable of resolution.

What seems to have happened is that the immediate cause is suppressed, perhaps before it has become clear to the patient that he has been stimulated at all. And at once the old ‘memory’ is substituted for the awareness of the current event. The subject of the early story becomes the main character, after the patient, in the current daydream, which has been drawn across to shut out the thinking proper to the immediate reality situation. Is not this account sufficient?

Another version: the feelings of rejection and hate are split off from the personality and are felt about someone absent in time and space.

To what extent are the mechanisms of dream-work evident elsewhere? For example, can all cruel and hostile feelings be displaced into a stammer? Or are they all condensed? In short, is it not possible that the mechanisms that Freud describes as peculiar to dream-work are in reality found to be operating over a wide area of the psyche and in a great number of different functional fields?

(I need to work out displacement condensation etc., and the relation to context and therefore changes in meaning.