Priority and Deferral: The Text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Laplanche and Pontalis, in The Language of Psychoanalysis, define “displacement” as follows:

the fact that an idea's emphasis, interest or intensity is liable to be detached from it and to pass on to other ideas, which were originally of little intensity but which are related to the first idea by a chain of associations.

This phenomenon, though particularly noticeable in the analysis of dreams, is also to be observed in the formation of psychoneurotic symptoms and, in a general way, in every unconscious formation.

The psychoanalytic theory of displacement depends upon the economic hypothesis of a cathectic energy able to detach itself from ideas and to run along associative pathways [1974, p. 121].

Freud's term, Verschiebung, has suggestions of dislocation, shunting onto another track, delay, postponement, or what I