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We have here to consider eight important papers of Freud's. While some of them contain elements of a purely expository nature, their main content consists of contributions to theoretical knowledge.
(1) The first one, entitled ‘The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words’, appeared in 1910 in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse.1 The occasion for writing it was Freud's finding by chance a little brochure that had been published by a German philologist, Abel, in 1884. This afforded some explanation of an apparently incomprehensible observation Freud had made years before in his investigation of dream life, and, incidentally, a confirmation of the trustworthiness of his technique.
Freud was enormously pleased at coming across this brochure. He wrote at once to Ferenczi: ‘A little discovery I made a few days ago has given me more pleasure than twelve articles of Aschaffenburg's could.2 A philologist called Abel had published in January, 1884, a brochure, Der Gegensinn der Urworte, in which he maintained no more and no less than that in many languages, Old Egyptian, Sanscrit, Arabic and even in Latin, opposites were designated by the same word. You will easily guess what part of my discoveries about the unconscious is thereby confirmed. It is a long time since I have felt so victorious.’3
Freud had observed that dream language was unable to express any negative concept, that the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ were simply omitted in it. Two results follow. Opposite ideas are often in dreams fused into a single entity. Furthermore, a single image is capable of representing both the plus and the minus aspects of itself, so that it is often hard to know at first sight which of the two opposite meanings is intended. This curious occurrence displays one more of the striking ways in which