"I Didn't Mean It"—Negation as a Character Trait

FREUD'S PAPER ON NEGATION (1925) PROVIDES US WITH AN EXCELLENT example of his concise, richly packed psychoanalytic writing. In 5 pages he covers a variety of seemingly diverse topics ranging from the role of perception in reality testing to the manner in which an intellectual function (judgment) acts as a substitute for repression. Characteristically, Freud begins his discussion with clinical material. He mentions patients who in the course of their analytic work may say, "Now you'll think I mean to say something insulting, but really I've no such intention." Or: "You ask who this person in the dream can be. It's not my mother" (p. 235). Freud offers these as typical examples of negation; and he states that through the use of this mechanism patients can bring certain subject matter of a repressed image into consciousness while concurrently holding that "I don't feel inclined to let the association count." In a footnote added in 1923 to the Dora case (1905), Freud made a similar observation: "There is another very remarkable and entirely trustworthy form of confirmation from the unconscious … namely, an exclamation on the part of the patient