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A description of the play of displacements, [[ideas]], and quantities in dreaming provides Freud with an easy transition to the second, and unfortunately the shortest part of the "Project," entitled "Psychopathology." Here he explains "[[hysterical]] [[compulsion]]" by means of a very interesting [[theory]] of the [[symbol]]. Whereas the displacements and substitutions that give rise to "[[symbols]]" in normal [[subjects]] are said to be the same in [[hysterics]], in the case of hysterics, "The symbol has in this case taken the [[place]] of the [[thing]] [that has been [[repressed]]] entirely" (p. 349). The two preconditions of repression coming into play, Freud asserts, are that the idea affected be unpleasurable and that it be sexual (p. 350). But "the core of the riddle" of repression remains, for, in contrast with [[hysteria]], "compulsive [[neurosis]]" can arise without symbol-[[formation]] (p. 352). Thus the "proton pseudos" is constituted by two premature scenes of a sexual [[nature]] whose impact is "deferred" until quantities of sexual excitation are released at [[puberty]]. The ego is then evaded by [[memories]] while it is preoccupied with defending itself against assaults coming from perception. The specific [[action]] of [[sexuality]] can be explained only by reference to its belatedness as compared with the rest of the [[individual]]'s development: "The retardation of puberty makes possible posthumous primary processes" (pp. 356, 359).
The third part of the "Project" is a long presentation of normal [[mental]] processes, in which Freud seeks to situate issues of general psychology—attention, judgment, thought, memory in relation to [[language]], and so on—within the framework that he has been developing. One interesting idea is that the [[pleasure principle]] might be an inhibiting mechanism that pushes the ego to learn attentiveness and to [[cathect]] the wishful idea to a moderate degree (p. 361). In the later development of his work, Freud would make these considerations the basis of the [[reality principle]], even though he would characteristically, given his predilection for over-rigorous oppositions, treat this as an absolute antagonist of the [[Pleasure Principle|pleasure principle]]. His discussion here of "observing thought" (pp. 363-65), meanwhile, though it might seem off-putting, may well have led him to develop the [[technique]] of "free [[association]]."
A final aspect of the "Project" that [[needs]] stressing is, according to [[James]] Strachey (SE 1, p. 291), the remarkable part played by sexuality in this early work. Freud was indeed rather too prone, later, to forget what he had described here as a cardinal aspect of repression—the fact that it affects only sexual ideas (p. 352); and he likewise paid insufficient attention to the [[impossibility]] for the [[child]] of metabolizing adult sexuality, of handling what in the "Project" are called "excessively intense" (überstark) ideas (p. 347). Simultaneously indicated and masked by the metaphorization of the general development of the mental apparatus, this embryonic account of the advent of a sexual "program" in the child is presented solely from the point of view of the "receiver" and offers no parallel description of the "transmitter," which would have introduced the interpersonal [[dimension]]. Precisely because of this omission, Freud would tend to espouse the idea of inborn sexual programming, in which context the [[primary process]] became proof of the [[unconscious]] as opposed to what it might have been if the view of the "Project" had been followed, namely a receiving area for an unconscious brought into being for its part by multiple encounters with the objects of [[childhood]].
