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| | The term '[[disavowal]]' (''Verleugnung'') (''déni'') - often translated as '[[disavowal|denial]]' - denotes a mental [[act]] that consists in rejecting the [[reality]] of a perception on account of its potentially [[trauma]]tic associations. | | The term '[[disavowal]]' (''Verleugnung'') (''déni'') - often translated as '[[disavowal|denial]]' - denotes a mental [[act]] that consists in rejecting the [[reality]] of a perception on account of its potentially [[trauma]]tic associations. |
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| − | ==Disavowal and Freud== | + | uGokBJ <a href="http://hacoabfidvkn.com/">hacoabfidvkn</a>, [url=http://zctnalhutunl.com/]zctnalhutunl[/url], [link=http://bffzbbmczbek.com/]bffzbbmczbek[/link], http://tqsdzbveyefs.com/ |
| − | The notion of [[disavowal]] made its appearance rather late in [[Freud]]'s work.
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| − | For years he was content to describe the little boy's refusal to recognize the absence of a penis in a little girl, as observed in clinical practice, without employing a specific term.
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| − | Thus, in his "On the Sexual Theories of Children" (1908c) and in the case history of "Little Hans" (1909b), he noted the phenomenon and described it in terms of a rejection of perceptual evidence. Little boys, he argued, do not doubt "that a genital like [their] own is to be attributed to everyone [they] know. . . . This conviction is energetically maintained by boys, is obstinately defended against the contradictions which soon result from observation, and is only abandoned after severe internal struggles (the castration complex)." The period concerned, lasting approximately from three to five years of age, Freud dubs the "phallic stage" in view of the narcissistic hypercathexis of the idea of the penis by which it is usually characterized—especially in the little boy, who finds it unthinkable that anyone worthy of respect should be without a penis, least of all his mother.
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| − | The little girl cannot similarly reject the perception of her own lack of a penis. However, in certain young girls, Freud notes "the hope of some day obtaining a penis in spite of everything and so becoming like a man may persist to an incredibly late age and may become a motive for strange and otherwise unaccountable actions."
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| − | Freud's first reference to the term was in the "[[Wolf Man]]" case history,<ref>1918b [1914], see also 1914a</ref> where he conceived of [[disavowal]] as operating between at least two regions of the [[ego]] which invalidated one another.
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| − | Thus one region might accept the [[symbolic]] character of [[castration]] and [[sexual difference]] while the other embraced the all-or-nothing logic of the [[phallic structure]], and everything proceeded as though the two spheres had no influence upon each other at all.
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| − | Beginning with the ''[[Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis]]'',<ref>1916-17a</ref> [[Freud]] began systematically using the verb ''verleugnen'' to refer to the mental act of rejecting a perception as inconceivable.
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| − | The noun form — ''die Verleugnung'' ([[disavowal]]) — was not used to designate the [[metapsychology|metapsychological]] concept until a little later.<ref>1925h</ref>
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| − | It was mainly in his late work, in ''[[A Short Account of Psychoanalysis]]''<ref>1940a [1938]</ref> and ''[[The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense]]'',<ref>1940e [1938]</ref> that [[Freud]] sought to anchor the specificity of [[disavowal]] by situating it within the particular [[topography]] of the split [[ego]].
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| − | In ''[[The Infantile Genital Organization]]'',<ref>1923e</ref> [[Freud]] reasserted that only the male organ played a significant role in the mind of the child of either sex around three years of age.
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| − | The child could understand the absence of a penis only as the result of castration.
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| − | It was therefore the manner in which the initial disavowal was overcome that determined the castration complex to which the individual would become subject.
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| − | Returning to this crucial question in ''[[Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes]]'',<ref>1925j</ref> [[Freud]] presented [[castration]] as a result of a '[[deferred action]],' the threatening nature of the possible [[absence]] of the [[penis]] assuming its full mental force only after a more or less extended period of [[disavowal]].
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| − | [[Freud]] also noted that the persistence of such [[disavowal]] beyond the phallic period, into adolescence and adulthood, could lead to a form of [[mental illness]]: "The process I would like to describe as denial [''Verleugnung''] ... appears to be neither rare nor very dangerous for the mental life of the child, but in adults it could lead to psychosis."
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| − | Moreover, Freud had published two observations of young men in whom denial of the lack of a penis appeared to determine the outbreak of [[psychosis|psychotic]] [[symptom|symptoms]].<ref>1914a</ref>
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| − | The first was the famous "[[Wolf Man]]," whom Freud claimed had "dismissed" [''verwarf''] the "[[reality]] [sic] of [[castration]]," that he "refused to know anything about it, in the sense of repressing it.
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| − | He did not actually pass judgment as to whether it existed or not, [castration] but effectively it did not."
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| − | This rejection, as inconceivable, of the possible [[absence]] of the [[penis]] was what triggered the [[patient]]'s returning [[hallucination]] of a severed little finger.
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| − | For [[Freud]], then, the [[psychosis|psychotic]] [[ego]] disavowed perceptual [[reality]] in a way somewhat akin to the way a [[neurosis|neurotic]] [[repression|repressed]] certain [[instincts|instinctual]] [[demand]]s.
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| − | But [[Freud]] subsequently went on to broaden his clinical work on [[disavowal]] well beyond the realm of [[psychosis]].
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| − | In ''[[Fetishism]]''<ref>1927e</ref> he reported a case of two young men each of whom denied the [[death]] of his [[father]].
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| − | However, Freud notes, neither of them developed a [[psychosis]], even though a "piece of reality which was undoubtedly important has been disavowed [''verleugnet''], just as the unwelcome fact of women's castration is disavowed in fetishists."
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| − | He then returned to the notion of the [[splitting of the ego]], presenting it as the [[topology|topographical]] corollary of the mechanism of [[disavowal]]: the possible juxtaposition in the [[psyche]] of at least two incompatible mental attitudes that appeared to have no influence on one another.
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| − | It was no longer a question, therefore, of treating [[disavowal]] as the disavowal "of" something but rather as a mutual disavowal, a disjunction "between" two discrete realms of the split [[ego]].
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| − | Similar disavowals were common, [[Freud]] noted, and not merely among [[fetishism|fetishists]].
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| − | In his later works Freud maintained that [[disavowal]] was present to varying degrees in [[psychosis]], [[perversion]], and very possibly too in all normal [[subject]]s.
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| − | He offered an instance from his personal experience in a public letter to Romain Roll - and ("A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," 1936a, p. 245).
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| − | It was also in his paper on "Fetishism" that [[Freud]] showed that disavowal, unlike [[repression]], did not erase the idea or perception in question but only its meaning; this was why he rejected the term '[[scotomization]]' proposed by René Laforgue.<ref>1927e, pp. 153-54</ref>
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| − | [[Disavowal]] was in fact a suspension of the function of judgment, of that same attributing judgment he felt was decisive in the formation of the [[ego]].
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| − | As a consequence of his methodological concern more clearly to distinguish [[disavowal]] and [[repression]], he ended by suggesting that repression treated the [[affect]] as disavowal treated the idea, which may be taken to mean that [[repression]] no more eliminates the [[affect]] (it is only displaced) than disavowal erases the idea (whose meaning alone remains obscure).
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| − | This having been said, it is important to recognize that all the clinical illustrations of disavowal supplied by [[Freud]] over a thirty-year period are based on two canonical illustrations: the disavowal of [[women]]'s [[lack]] of a [[penis]] and the disavowal of the [[death]] of the [[father]].
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| − | [[Disavowal]] is thus always a disavowal of [[absence]], which is why it is so important in the process of symbolization.
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| − | In fact, [[Freud]] specifies as a prerequisite of [[symbolization]] the ability to represent the [[object]] to oneself as something that can be absent: an object, he says, can only be symbolized in absentia.
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| − | The [[disavowal]] (of [[absence]]) therefore constitutes a fundamental obstacle to the very process of constructing psychic [[reality]], and in this it is quite distinct from [[negation]], which operates as the starting point of the ([[preconscious]]) mental recognition of something: disavowal and negation are radically different in their logical functions.
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| − | [[Disavowal]], as opposed to [[negation]], is a [[narcissism|narcissistic]] expedient whereby the [[individual]] seeks to avoid acknowledging absences or shortcomings of key parental figures ([[castration]] of the [[mother]], [[death]] of the [[father]]).
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| − | In practice, however, it transpires that persistent disavowal hardly allows the subject to overcome the [[trauma]]tic burden of the representations in question; indeed the potential latent virulence of these representations appears rather to be made permanent by the invalidation of possible [[symbolic]] links.
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| − | Moreover, whatever suffering [[disavowal]] and [[splitting]] may spare the [[subject]]'s [[consciousness]] is generally proportionately visited upon those around him.
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| − | In the [[treatment]] of [[patient]]s afflicted by enduring [[disavowal]], everything suggests that they want to leave the responsibility of thinking what is for them unthinkable, of integrating what they cannot integrate, up to the "other" member in the therapeutic relationship.
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| − | This occurs primarily through the mechanism of [[projection|projective]] [[identification]], which requires considerable psychic expenditure on the part of that other person, often within a very painful experiential realm.
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| − | This kind of detour through the mental economy of the therapist is seemingly a necessary but not sufficient condition for the subject's successful integration of such elements into a symbolic interplay thanks to which the [[pleasure principle]] can again become effective.
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| − | [[Jacques Lacan]] in his 1956-1957 [[seminar]] on ''[[Object Relations]]'', talks about [[disavowal]] (he uses the French ''démenti'') as a fundamental mechanism of the so-called [[perversion|perverse structure]], with its characteristic manner of treating [[castration]]: simultaneously rejecting and accepting it.
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| − | He employs the term '[[foreclosure]]' to refer to the mechanism of [[symbolic]] [[denial]], which he feels is a key factor in [[psychosis]].
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| − | [[Freud]] uses the term ''Verleugnung'' to denote "a specific mode of defence which consists in the subject's refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception."<ref>Laplanche and Pontalis 1967: 118</ref>
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| − | He introduces the term in 1923 in connection with the [[Castration Complex]], the [[trauma]]tic perception being the sight of the [[female]] genitalia; when [[children]] first discover the [[absence]] of the [[penis]] in the girl, they "disavow the fact and believe that they do see a penis all the same."<ref>Freud, 1923e: SE XIX: 143-4</ref>
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| − | [[Freud]] continues to employ the term throughout the rest of the work, linking it specifically both to [[psychosis]] and to [[fetishism]].
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| − | In these [[clinic|clinical]] conditions, [[disavowal]] is always accompanied by the opposite attitude (acceptance of [[reality]]), since it is "rarely or perhaps never" possible for "the ego's detachment from reality to be carried through completely."<ref>freud, 1940a: SE XXIII, 201</ref>
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| − | The coexistence in the [[ego]] of these two contradictory attitudes to [[reality]] leads to what [[Freud]] terms "the [[splitting of the ego]]." (See [[Split]])
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| − | While Freud's use of the term is quite consistent, he does not distinguish the term rigorously from other related operations.
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| − | Lacan, however, works the term into a rigorous theory, relating it and contrasting it specifically with operations of [[repression]] and [[foreclosure]].
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| − | Whereas Freud had only linked disavowal to one form of [[perversion]], Lacan makes it the fundamental operation in all forms of [[perversion]].
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| − | And whereas [[Freud]] had also linked disavowal with [[psychosis]], [[Lacan]] limits disavowal exclusively to the structure of [[perversion]].
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| − | [[Disavowal]] is the fundamental operation in [[perversion]], just as [[repression]] and [[foreclosure]] are the fundamental operations in [[neurosis]] and [[psychosis]].
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| − | Thus, in Lacan's account, disavowal is one way of responding to the [[castration]] of the [[Other]]; whereas the [[neurosis|neurotic]] represses the realization of [[castration]], the [[perversion|pervert]] disavows it.
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| − | Like [[Freud]], [[Lacan]] asserts that [[disavowal]] is always accompanied by a silmultaneous acknowledgement of what is disavowed.
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| − | Thus the [[perversion|pervert]] is not simply ignorant of [[castration]]; he simultaneously knows it and denies it.
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| − | Whereas the term disavowal originally denotes, in Freud's work, only one side of this operation (the side of [[denial]]), for Lacan the term comes to denote both sides, the simultaneous denial and recognition of [[castration]].
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| − | Whereas Freud relates disavowal to the perception of the [[absence]] of the [[penis]] in women, Lacan relates it to the realization of the absence of the [[phallus]] in the [[Other]].
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| − | The [[trauma]]tic perception is, in Lacan's acccount, the realization that the [[cause of desire]] is always a [[lack]].
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| − | [[Disavowal]] is the failure to accept that [[lack]] causes [[desire]], the [[belief]] that desire is caused by a [[presence]] (e.g. the [[fetishism|fetish]]).
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| | ==See Also== | | ==See Also== |
