Chapter 13 The Work of the Negative1

The negative is not an individualized notion as such in psychoanalytic writings. In Freud’s work, it figures as an adjective. Negative hallucination, a concept to which I attribute a central importance, was mentioned on several occasions by Freud during the hypno-cathartic period. The idea was common in Bernheim’s circles. Freud gave several examples of it at the beginning of his work; then the notion was eclipsed in the theory, only reappearing incidentally in a note in ‘A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’ . Two particular mentions of it must be recalled here: the first defining neurosis as the negative of perversion; the second characterizing a regrettable evolution in the treatment, namely, the negative therapeutic reaction. It can be said that Freud’s work is situated between two limits. But there is still nothing there to justify the noun, ‘the’ negative, for this form of thinking is quite far removed from Freud’s. The idea re-emerged during Lacan’s Hegelian period, though he paid little attention to it.

When one consults the systematic index of the major concepts of Lacan’s Ecrits drawn up by Jacques-Alain Miller, one sees that it is given scarcely any place among the Hegelian categories (B,2C). An attentive reading of the author of the index, as well as the list of Freud’s terms in German, confirms this. Thus there is no anteriority for the introduction of the negative as a concept in psychoanalysis, any more in Lacan than in Freud. Moreover, in Hegel’s work, it had a relatively limited significance in this direct form. One thus comes to the conclusion that it is perhaps in some of the contents of psychoanalytic theory that the negative has to be discovered, even though the term is not mentioned, and that an analysis of it will bring us many surprises. There exist many ‘traces’ of the negative in Freud – a negative that is, so to speak, unconscious of itself beginning with the concept of the un-conscious. But m