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She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street….
But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange unseen place on the other side.
In a footnote in the Studies on Hysteria Freud drew attention to a state of mind which he described as the ‘blindness of the seeing eye’, in which ‘one knows and does not know a thing at the same time’ (Freud 1893-5:117). Later he was to use the noun Verleugnung, which Strachey translated as ‘disavowal’, to describe this non-psychotic form of denial (Freud 1924b, 1927b, 1938). In 1938 he wrote of it as a ‘half measure’ in which ‘the disavowal is always supplemented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes arise and result in…a splitting of the ego’ (Freud 1938:204). Basch (1983) has suggested that, unlike psychotic denial, disavowal obliterates only the significance of things, and not their perception. Steiner (1985) used the phrase ‘turning a blind eye’ for this defence, relating it to the Oedipus complex in particular. In Chapter 1 I described it as ‘the willing suspension of belief, which results in facts being known but not believed.
Freud describes disavowal in two clinical conditions, perversion and obsessional neurosis (Freud 1927b). However, there is another syndrome in which disavowal is not partial but all-pervasive, what Helene Deutsch (1942) called the ‘as-if’ personality. In this pathological organisation disavowal is placed at the centre of the individual’s mental life and characterises his or her whole relationship to the world. Deutsch emphasised the pervasive sense of unreality of such a person’s relationship with the world and with themselves, the complete lack of conflict, and the contrast between apparent sensitive emotional capacity and the apparent absence of inner experience. Deutsch says the ‘as-if’ personalities neither fly to external
reality to escape their minds nor withdraw into an inner world to avo