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There is a trick that children sometimes play on each other, which when first learned is a great source of satisfaction and amusement: it consists of saying “Don't think of x!” (where x is something bizarre, such as a green elephant) and then gleefully pointing out that the person who has been told not to think of x is inevitably thinking of it, at that very moment and in virtue of that very fact. This closely argued book maintains, in effect, that the structure of that childish trick, raised to a more complex power, is the structure of neurosis. Its central theme is that the official Freudian view, according to which material repressed into the unconscious struggles to emerge but is regularly prevented from doing so except in dreams, parapraxes, jokes, or neurotic symptoms, has got it all backwards. Unconscious contents emerge not because they want to, but rather because the patient wants them not to—and wants this so actively that they become “what most occupies him” (p. 143).
This formulation recalls Jean-Paul Sartre's (1964) description of an atheist friend as “a God-obsessed crank who saw His absence everywhere and who could not open his mouth without uttering His name” (p. 62). Freud's own doctrine of the Verneinung comes to mind also: the structure of denial is paradoxical. My association to Sartre is clearly not accidental, for Sartre's polemic against Freud, in which he argues for the transparency of the self to itself as against the opacity of the Freudian Id, turns on his claim that, if repression is to occur, the censor must know what it denies. Weiss would seem to agree with this. He identifies a “first agency,” corresponding roughly to primary process, whose wishes are unconscious, and a “second agency” whose (adult) wishes belong at least to the preconscious: