Negation

The manner in which our patients bring forward their associations during the work of analysis gives us an opportunity for making some interesting observations. 'Now you'll think I mean to say something insulting, but really I've no such intention.' We see at once that this is a repudiation, by means of projection, of an association that has just emerged. Or again: 'You ask who this person in the dream can have been. It was not my mother'. We emend this: so it was his mother. In our interpretation we take the liberty of disregarding the negation and of simply picking out the subject-matter of the association. It is just as though the patient had said: 'It is true that I thought of my mother in connection with this person, but I don't feel at all inclined to allow the association to count'.

There is a most convenient method by which one can sometimes obtain a necessary light upon a piece of unconscious and repressed material. 'What', one asks, 'would you consider was about the most unlikely thing in the world in that situation? What do you think was furthest from your mind at the time?' If the patient falls into the trap and names what he thinks most incredible, he almost invariably in so doing makes the correct admission. A nice counterpart of this experiment is often met with in obsessional neurotics who have been initiated into the meaning of their symptoms. 'A new obsessive idea came over me; and it immediately occurred to me that it might mean so and so. But of course that can't be true, or it couldn't have occurred