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= D.: Bindung.–Es.: ligazón.–Fr.: liaison.–I.: legame.–P.: ligação.
Term used by Freud in a very general way and on comparatively distinct levels (as much on the biological level as on that of the psychical apparatus) to denote an operation tending to restrict the free flow of excitations, to link ideas to one another and to constitute and maintain relatively stable forms.
Although the term ‘’ ought to be seen in connection with the contrast between *, its meaning is not exhausted by this purely economic connotation. Beyond its strictly technical use, the expression–which occurs at different points in Freud's work–answers a permanent conceptual need.
Rather than enumerate its uses, we have chosen to outline its importance at three stages of Freud's metapsychology where it plays a cardinal role:
I. In the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1950a [1895]), Bindung denotes primarily the fact that the energy of the neuronal apparatus proceeds from the free to the bound state, or else that it is already in the bound state. For Freud, this binding implies the existence of a mass of neurones which are well connected and which have good facilitations between them–in other words, the ego: ‘… the ego itself is a mass like this of neurones which hold fast to their –are, that is, in a bound state; and this, surely, can only happen as a result of the effect they have on one another’ 1a.
This bound mass itself exerts an inhibitory or binding effect on other processes. When Freud concerns himself, for example, with the fate of certain memories relating to painful experiences (Schmerzerlebnisse) which upon recollection ‘arouse affect and also unpleasure’, he describes them as ‘untamed’ (ungebändigt): ‘If a passage of thought comes up against a still untamed mnemic image of this kind, then its indications of quality, often of a sensory kind, are generated, with a feeling of unpleasure and an inclination to discharge, the combination of which characterizes a particular affect, a