Opposing concepts like “denial” and “fulfillment” are indicative of conflicting pulls in Freudian theory that can also be described in terms of the tension between “asceticism” and “ecstasy.” The author divides Freud's thinking into three distinct phases—demonological speculation, labyrinthine speculation, cosmogonical speculation—and demonstrates that in each of these phases the relative emphasis on the ascetic and the ecstatic differs. Further, Düe points out that on the formal level Freud's theories are affected by those phenomena which he defines as being ascetic or ecstatic in nature. In the history of ideas, the author sets the opposition between asceticism and ecstasy against the broader horizon of the opposition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.