You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This three-page manuscript of Freud is dated January 2, 1938. Freud writes here about a phenomenon which he first discussed in his papers, Neurosis and Psychosis, and Fetishism, and which seems to have interested him considerably in his latter years because the posthumous Outline of Psychoanalysis also gives a chapter to it. It is the defense mechanism of denial, the ability not to recognize or not fully to recognize certain data of reality. That such a denial is not limited to psychotics was demonstrated by Freud in the fetishist whose displacement is an attempt to deny the female lack of penis. Freud hastens to add that similar mechanisms occur in normal people. In normal people it presupposes the simultaneous effectiveness of another mechanism, a certain cleavage of the ego (Ichspaltung). The fetishist knows consciously that women have no penis, but the unconscious part of his ego succeeds in not acknowledging just this knowledge. A part of his ego knows; another part of his ego does not know. A child whose experience creates the conception that a certain instinct satisfaction may be dangerous, may defend itself against this danger and simultaneously deny the existence of the danger altogether. A boy whose masturbation is threatened by castration 'continues his masturbation as if it were not endangering his penis at all; at the same time he develops a symptom—in full contradiction to his apparent bravery and indifference—a symptom which proves that he nevertheless realizes a danger'.