The author discusses Freud's article entitled “Negation” and his arguments about the formation of the psyche and reality. Sitbon attempts first to disengage the theoretical consequences developed by Freud in “Negation” for the establishment of reality and the psychic apparatus, and then proceeds to examine the characteristics of the object that permit such a process to take place. Finally, the author draws on all of this to derive what he finds to be important for psychoanalytic technique, especially in the case of psychotic patients.

Such preoccupations were not new to Freud, who had considered them earlier in “The Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911). For