Ferenczi, Sandor (1926). The problem of acceptance of unpleasant ideas: advances in knowledge of the sense of reality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7: 312–323.
Freud gave up his seduction theory to invent psychoanalysis as the investigation of the internal, or psychic, world. External reality was then viewed in a different way—not in terms of its impact on the patient, but in terms of the perceptions the patient had of external figures. The notion of an imago, or internal object (Abraham, 1924) came to the fore, and Freud became interested in the capacity for realistic recognition of external others, or the interruption or disabling of accurate recognition. He dealt with this in his “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning” (Freud, 1911b). In 1913 Ferenczi argued that Freud had concentrated on the distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, but had done less to describe how a child develops from one to the other.
In that paper, Ferenczi’s first on the sense of reality, he proceeded to elaborate several developmental phases prior to a proper objective appreciation of reality; he called these “unconditional omnipotence”, “magical–hallucinatory omnipotence”, “omnipotence by magical gestures”, and “magical thoughts and magical words”, before the subsequent renunciation of omnipotence. These phases are in relation to the ego-instincts as autoerotism and narcissism are to the libido.
Ferenczi returned dissatisfied to the theme in 1926, in the paper republished in this volume. He wished to add to the final step— relinquishing omnipotence to allow the objective recognition of an object, even if it is a source of unpleasure as well as pleasure. What impels the infant from denial to acceptance? He relied on Freud’s paper “Negation”, which had recently been published (Freud, 1925h), and argued that negation is a transition stage between denial and acceptance. Denial repudiated the existence of something unpleasant. A step on from that is negation, the existence of something bad is admitted but is not a part of the self. It is a judgement about the location of the object; it is outside the ego, separate and independent.
He makes the point that the recognition of reality depends on an ambivalence, a love for a satisfying object which can later be hated because it is no longer present and available for satisfaction, but is attributed as outside and separate. Ferenczi further argued that this process of recognizing a separate object is bought, as it were, with the price of a compensation. The compensation for acknowledging and tolerating that the external source of unpleasure does exist, is that the loved pleasure-giving object is found again. The satisfying object has not disappeared for good; and so the gain is this reassurance, and that makes the relinquishing of omnipotence worthwhile. In the process, the loved object which is introjected and judged as the self, in Freud’s description, is recognized as also the hated object that is externalized as poisonous.
In some respects Ferenczi’s descriptions of the clinging to omnipotence and the wrenching clear from the narcissistic stage is a forerunner of Mahler’s separation–individuation model (Mahler et al., 1975), and it also covers ground which Winnicott differently explored with the notion of the transitional object as a means to prolong the sense of omnipotence (1953). Freud also returned to the pathological clinging to omnipotence when, around this time (Freud, 1927e), he described the fetishist. The link that Ferenczi makes between ambivalence and the achievement of the reality principle recurs in Ferenczi’s analysand Melanie Klein and the depressive position (1935).
Ferenczi’s two papers turn a light upon a theme of fundamental theoretical and clinical importance to psychoanalysts, which many have returned to in their own ways again and again. It is impressive how Ferenczi’s ideas here hint at many theories that come later.
Abraham, K. (1973) [1924]. A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (pp. 418–501). London: Hogarth.
Ferenczi, S. (1926). The problem of acceptance of unpleasant ideas: advances in knowledge of the sense of reality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7: 312–323.
Ferenczi, S. (1952) [1913]. Stages in the development of the sense of reality. First Contributions to Psychoanalysis (pp. 213–239). London: Hogarth.
Freud S. (1911b). Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning. S.E., 12: 218–226. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1925h). Negation. S.E., 19: 235–240. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1927e). Fetishism. S.E., 21: 152–157. London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of mainc depressive states. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16: 145–174.
Mahler, M., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. London: Hutchison.
Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34: 89–97.
S. Ferenczi
Not long after I first made acquaintance with psycho-analysis I encountered the problem of the sense of reality, a mode of mental functioning which seemed to be in sharp contrast to the tendency towards flight from “pain” and towards repression otherwise so universally demonstrable in mental life. By means of a kind of empathy into the infantile mind, I arrived at the following hypothesis. To a child kept immune from any pain the whole of existence must appear to be a unity—”monistic”, so to speak. Discrimination between “good” and “bad” things, ego and environment, inner and outer world, would only come later; at this stage alien and hostile would therefore be identical.1 In a subsequent work I attempted to reconstruct theoretically the principal stages in the development from the pleasure-principle to the reality-principle.2 I assumed that before it has experienced its first disappointments a child believes itself to be unconditionally omnipotent, and further that it clings to this feeling of omnipotence, even when the effectiveness of its power in the fulfilment of its wishes is bound up with the observance of certain conditions. It is only the growing number and complexity of these conditions that compel it to surrender the feeling of omnipotence and to recognize reality generally. In describing this development, however, nothing could at that time be said of the inner processes that must accompany this remarkable and important transformation; our knowledge of the deeper foundations of the mind—especially of instinctual life—was still too undeveloped to allow of this. Since then Freud’s penetrating researches into instinctual life and his discoveries in the analysis of the ego have brought us nearer to this goal;3 but we were still unable satisfactorily to bridge the gap between instinctual life and intellectual life. It was plain that we still needed that supreme simplification into which Freud has been at last able to reduce the multiplicity of instinctual phenomena; I refer to his view concerning the instinctual polarity that lies at the basis of all life—his doctrine of the life-instinct (Eros) and the death-instinct or destruction-instinct.4 Yet not until one of Freud’s latest works appeared—’Die Verneinung”,5 under which modest title lies concealed the beginnings of a psychology of the thought-processes, founded on biology—have the hitherto scattered fragments of our knowledge been gathered together. As always, here once more Freud takes his stand on the sure ground of psycho-analytical experience, and is extremely cautious in generalization. Following in his footsteps, I shall attempt once more to deal with the problem of the sense of reality in the light of his discovery.
Freud has discovered the psychological act of a negation of reality to be a transition-phase between ignoring and accepting reality; the alien and therefore hostile outer world becomes capable of entering consciousness, in spite of “pain”, when it is supplied with the minus prefix of negation, i.e. when it is denied. In negativism, the tendency to abolish things, we see still at work the repressing forces which in the primary processes lead to a complete ignoring of whatever is “painful”; negative hallucinatory ignoring is no longer successful; the “pain” is no longer ignored, but becomes the subject-matter of perception as a negation. The question naturally arises at once: what must take place in order that the final obstacle to acceptance may be also removed from the path, and the affirmation of an unpleasant idea (i.e. the complete disappearance of the tendency to repression) made possible?
The suspicion also arises immediately that this is a question that is not to be easily answered; but since Freud’s discovery this, at least, is clear from the outset: the affirmation of an unpleasant idea is never a simple thing, but is always a two-fold mental act. First an attempt is made to deny it as a fact, then a fresh effort has to be made to negate this negation, so that the positive, the recognition of evil, may really be assumed always to result from two negatives. To find anything comparable to this in the familiar realm of psychoanalysis we should have to draw an analogy between complete denial and the mental state of a child who still ignores everything unpleasant. In the same way I endeavoured some time ago to show that the fixation-point of the psychoses is to be found at this stage,6 and I explained the uninhibited capacity for constant euphoria that is found in cases of megalomanic paralysis as a regression to this phase.7 The stage of negation has an analogy, as Freud has shown, in the behaviour of a patient during treatment, and especially in a neurosis, which is similarly the result of a half-successful or unsuccessful repression and is actually always a negative—the negative of a perversion. The process by which recognition or affirmation of something unpleasant is finally reached goes on before our eyes, as the result of our therapeutic efforts when we cure a neurosis, and, if we pay attention to the details of the curative process, we shall be able to form some idea of the process of acceptance as well.
We note, then, that at the height of the transference the patient unresistingly accepts even what is most painful; clearly he finds in the feeling of pleasure accompanying the transference-love a consolation for the pain that this acceptance would otherwise have cost him. But if, at the close of the treatment, when the transference also has to be renounced, the patient were not successful in gradually finding for this renunciation too a substitute and consolation in reality, no matter how sublimated that substitute might be, there would undoubtedly follow a relapse into negation, i.e. into neurosis. In this connection we are involuntarily reminded of a very fruitful work by Victor Tausk, an analyst whose too early death we all deplore. In his “Compensation as a means of discounting the motive of repression’8 he adduced the weakening of the motives of repression by compensation as a condition of the cure. In a similar fashion we must suspect the presence of a compensation even in the very first appearance of an acceptance of something unpleasant; indeed in no other way can we conceive of its originating in the mind, for this moves always in the direction of least resistance, i.e. according to the pleasure-principle. As a matter of fact we find as early as in Freud’s Traumdeutung a passage which explains in a similar manner the transformation of a primary into a secondary process. He tells us there that a hungry baby tries at first to procure satisfaction by a kind of hallucination; and only when this fails does it make those manifestations of “pain” that lead to a real satisfaction as their result. We see that here for the first time the mental mode of reaction seems to be conditioned by a quantitative factor. The recognition of the hostile environment is unpleasant, but at the moment non-recognition of it is still more painful; consequently the less painful becomes relatively pleasurable, and, as such, can be accepted. It is only when we take into consideration the fact of compensation and avoidance of a still greater “pain”, that we are able in any way to understand the possibility of an affirmation of “pain” without being compelled to renounce the universal validity of the search for pleasure as the fundamental psychical trend. But by doing so we are clearly postulating the intervention of a new instrument into the mental mechanism—a sort of reckoning-machine, the installation of which confronts us again with fresh and possibly still more puzzling enigmas.
We shall return later to the problem of psychical mathematics; meanwhile let us consider the mental content of the materials in relation to which a baby accomplishes the acceptance of reality. When Freud tells us that a human being ceaselessly or at rhythmic intervals observes his environment by “feeling after”, “handling” and “tasting” little samples of it, he clearly takes a baby’s procedure when it misses and feels after its mother’s breast as the prototype of all subsequent thought-processes. A similar train of thought led me in my bio-analytical paper9 to assume that smelling or sniffing the surrounding world shows a still greater likeness to the act of thinking, since it allows of finer and more minute samples being tested. Oral incorporation is carried out only when the result of the test is favourable. The intellectual difference between a child that puts everything indiscriminately into its mouth and one that only turns to things that smell pleasantly is therefore quite an important one.
Let us keep, however, to the example of the baby that wants to suck. Let us assume that up till now it has always been appeased in good time, and that this is its first experience of the “pain” of hunger and thirst; what probably takes place in its mind? In its primal, narcissistic self-assurance it has hitherto only known itself; it has known nothing of the existence of objects outside itself, which, of course, include even the mother, and could therefore have no feelings towards them, either friendly or hostile. There apparently occurs—possibly in connection with the physiological destruction produced in the organic tissues by the absence of nutrition—an “instinctual defusion” in the mental life as well, which finds expression first of all in unco-ordinated motor discharge and in crying— manifestations which we may quite well compare with expressions of rage in adults. When after long waiting and screaming the mother’s breast is regained, this no longer has the effect of an indifferent thing which is always there when it is wanted, so that its existence does not need to be recognized; it has become an object of love and hate, of hate because of its being temporarily unobtainable, and of love because after this loss it offers a still more intense satisfaction. In any case it certainly becomes at the same time, although no doubt very obscurely, the subject of a “concrete idea”. This example illustrates, it seems to me, the following very important sentences in Freud’s paper, “Die Verneinung”: “The first and most immediate aim of testing the reality of things is not to find in reality an object corresponding to the thing represented, but to find it again, to be convinced that it is still there”, and “We recognize as a condition for the testing of reality that objects which formerly had brought satisfaction must have been lost.”10 We are only tempted to add further that the ambivalence indicated above, i.e. instinctual defusion, is an absolutely necessary condition for the coming into existence of a concrete idea. Things that always love us, i.e. that constantly satisfy all our needs, we do not notice as such, we simply reckon them as part of our subjective ego; things which are and always have been hostile to us, we simply deny; but to those things which do not yield unconditionally to our desires, which we love because they bring us satisfaction, and hate because they do not submit to us in everything, we attach special mental marks, memory-traces with the quality of objectivity, and we are glad when we find them again in reality, i.e. when we are able to love them once more. And when we hate an object but cannot suppress it so completely as to be able to deny it permanently, our taking notice of its existence shows that we want really to love it, but are only prevented from doing so by the “maliciousness of the object”. The savage is therefore only logical when after killing his enemy he shows him the greatest love and honour. He is simply demonstrating that what he likes best of all is to be left in peace; he wants to live in undisturbed harmony with his environment, but is prevented from doing so by the existence of a “disturbing object”. When this obstacle appears it leads to a defusion of his instincts, so that the aggressive, destructive component comes to the fore. After his revenge is satisfied the other—the love-component—seeks satisfaction. It seems as if the two classes of instincts neutralize each other when the ego is in a state of rest, like the positive and negative currents in an electrically inactive body, and as if, in just the same way, special external influences were needed to separate the two currents and thus render them once more capable of action. The emergence of ambivalence would thus be a kind of protective device, instituting the capacity for active resistance in general, which, like the mental phenomenon accompanying it, recognition of the objective world, signifies one of the means of obtaining mastery over it.
We perceive, however, that while ambivalence no doubt leads to acceptance of the existence of things, it does not carry us as far as objective contemplation; on the contrary, things become alternately the objects of passionate hate and equally passionate love. In order that “objectivity” may be obtained it is necessary for the instincts that have been released to be inhibited, i.e. again mixed with one another, a fresh instinctual fusion thus taking place after recognition has been achieved. This is probably the mental process which guarantees the inhibition and postponement of action until the external reality has been identified with the “thought-reality” (Freud); the capacity for objective judgement and action is thus essentially a capacity of the tendencies of loving and hating for neutralizing one another—a statement that certainly sounds very like a platitude. I think, however, that we can in all seriousness assume that the mutual binding of attracting and repelling forces is a process of mental energy at work in every compromise-formation, and in every objective observation, and that the maxim sine ira et sine studio must be replaced by another, namely, that for the objective contemplation of things, full scope must be given to an equal amount both of ira and of studium.
Clearly, then, there are stages in the development of the capacity for objectivity too. In my article on the development of the sense of reality I described the gradual surrender of personal omnipotence, and its transference to other higher powers (nurses, parents, gods). I called this the period of omnipotence by means of magic gestures and words; as the last stage, that of insight derived from painful experience, I regarded the final and complete surrender of omnipotence—the scientific stage, so to speak, of our recognition of the world. In psycho-analytical phraseology, I called the first phase of all, in which the ego alone exists and includes in itself the whole world of experience, the period of introjection; the second phase, in which omnipotence is ascribed to external powers, the period of projection; the last stage of development might be thought of as the stage in which both mechanisms are employed in equal measure or in mutual compensation. This sequence corresponded roughly to the representation of human development broadly outlined in Freud’s Totem und Tabu as a succession of magical, religious and scientific stages. When, however, I attempted much later to bring some light to bear critically on the manner in which our present-day science is working, I was compelled to assume that, if science is really to remain objective, it must work alternately as pure psychology and pure natural science,11 and must verify both our inner and outer experience by analogies taken from both points of view; this implies an oscillation between projection and introjection. I called this the “utraquism” of all true scientific work. In philosophy ultra-idealistic solipsism means a relapse into egocentric infantilism; the purely materialistic psychophobe standpoint signifies a regression to the exaggerations of the projection-phase; while Freud’s maintenance of a dualism completely fulfils the utraquistic demand.
We are justified in hoping that Freud’s discovery of negation as a transition-stage between denial and acceptance of what is unpleasant, will help us to a better understanding of these developmental stages and their sequence, besides simplifying our view of them. The first painful step towards recognition of the external world is certainly the knowledge that some of the “good things” do not belong to the ego, and must be distinguished from it as the “outer world” (the mother’s breast). Almost at the same time a human being has to learn that something unpleasant, that is, “bad”, can take place within him (in the ego itself, so to speak) which cannot be shaken off either by hallucination or in any other way (hunger, thirst). A further advance is made when he learns to endure absolute deprivation from without, i.e. when he recognizes that there are also things that must be relinquished for good and all; the process parallel to this is the recognition of repressed wishes while realization of them is at the same time renounced. Since, as we know now, a quota of Eros, i.e. of love, is necessary for this recognition, and since this addition is inconceivable without introjection, i.e. identification, we are forced to say that recognition of the surrounding world is actually a partial realization of the Christian imperative “Love your enemies”. It is true that the opposition which the psycho-analytical doctrine of instinct meets with certainly proves that reconciliation with our inner foe is the most difficult task that humanity is called upon to accomplish.
When we attempt to bring our fresh knowledge into connection with the topographical system of Freudian metapsychology, we surmise that at the stage of absolute solipsism only Pcpt-Cs, i.e. the perceptual superficies of the mind, is functioning; the period of negation coincides with the formation of Ucs repressed strata; the conscious acceptance of the outer world requires further that hypercathexis of which we are made capable only by the institution of another psychical system—the preconscious (Pcs)—interposed between the Ucs and the Cs. In accordance with the fundamental law of biogenesis the racial history of the evolution of the mind is thus repeated in the psychical development of the individual; for the serial sequence here described is the same as that by which we must imagine the progressive evolution of psychical systems in organisms.
In organic development too we find prototypes of the progressive adaptation of living creatures to the reality of the external world. There are primitive organisms that seem to have remained at the narcissistic stage; they wait passively for the satisfaction of their needs, and if this is denied them permanently they simply perish. They are still much nearer to the point of emergence from the unorganic, and on that account their instinct of destruction has a shorter path to travel back, i.e. it is much stronger. At the next stage the organism is able to thrust off parts of itself that cause pain and in this way save its life (autotomy); I once called this sort of sequestration a physiological prototype of the process of repression. Not until after further development is the faculty for adaptation to reality created—an organic recognition of the environment, so to speak; very fine examples of this can be seen in the mode of life of organisms that are symbiotically united; but the fact is patent in every other act of adaptation. In connection with my “bio-analytical” point of view, we can accordingly distinguish even in the organic between primary and secondary processes—processes, that is, which in the realm of the mind we regard as stages in intellectual development. That would mean, however, that in a certain degree and sense the organic also possesses a kind of reckoning-machine, which is concerned not simply with qualities of pleasure and “pain”, but also with quantities. To be sure, organic adaptation is characterized by a certain inflexibility, seen in the reflex processes which are undoubtedly purposive but immutable, while the capacity for adaptation shows a continual readiness to recognize new realities and the capacity to inhibit action until the act of thinking is completed. Groddeck is therefore right in regarding the organic id as intelligent; but he shows bias when he overlooks the difference in degree between the intelligence of the ego and that of the id.
In this connection we may instance the fact that in organic pathology too we have an opportunity of seeing the work of negation (autotomy) and adaptation in operation. I have already attempted to trace certain processes of organic healing (of wounds, etc.) to the flow of a current of libido (Eros) to the injured place.12
We must not disguise from ourselves that all these considerations still furnish no satisfactory explanation of the fact that, both in organic and in psychical adaptation to the real environment, portions of the hostile outer world are, with the assistance of Eros, reckoned as part of the ego, and on the other hand, loved portions of the ego itself are given up. Possibly here we may have recourse to the more or less psychological explanation that even the actual renunciation of a pleasure and the recognition of something unpleasant are always only “provisional”, as it were; it is obedience under protest, so to speak, with the mental reservation of a restitutio in integrum. This may hold good in very many cases; there is evidence for it in the capacity for regression to modes of reaction that have long since been surmounted and are even archaic—a capacity that is preserved potentially and in special circumstances brought into operation. What looks like adaptation would thus be only an attitude of interminable waiting and hoping for the return of the “good old times”, differing fundamentally therefore only in degree from the behaviour of the rotiferæ which remain dried-up for years waiting for moisture. We must not forget, however, that there is also such a thing as a real and irreparable loss of organs and portions of organs, and that in the psychical realm also complete renunciation without any compensation exists. Such optimistic explanations therefore really do not help us; we must have recourse to the Freudian doctrine of instinct, which shows that there are cases in which the destruction-instinct turns against the subject’s own person, indeed, that the tendency to self-destruction, to death, is the more primary, and has been directed outwards only in the course of development. We may suppose that whenever adaptation is achieved, a similar, as it were masochistic, alteration in the direction of aggression plays a part. Further, I have already pointed out above that the surrender of loved parts of the ego and the introjection of the non-ego are parallel processes; and that we are able to love (recognize) objects only by a sacrifice of our narcissism, which is after all but a fresh illustration of the well-known psychoanalytical fact that all object-love takes place at the expense of narcissism.
The remarkable thing about this self-destruction is that here (in adaptation, in the recognition of the surrounding world, in the forming of objective judgements) destruction does in actual fact become the “cause of being”.13 A partial destruction of the ego is tolerated, but only for the purpose of constructing out of what remains an ego capable of still greater resistance. This is similar to the phenomena noted in the ingenious attempts of Jacques Loeb to stimulate unfertilized eggs to development by the action of chemicals, i.e. without fertilization: the chemicals disorganize the outer layers of the egg, but out of the detritus a protective bladder (sheath) is formed, which puts a stop to further injury. In the same way the Eros liberated by instinctual defusion converts destruction into growth, into a further development of the parts that have been protected. I admit that it is very hazardous to apply organic analogies immediately to the psychical: let it serve for my excuse that I am doing it deliberately, and only with regard to so-called “ultimate problems”, where, as I have explained elsewhere, analytical judgements take us no further, and where we have to search for analogies in other fields in order to form a synthetic judgement. Psycho-analysis, like every psychology, in its attempts to dig to the depths must strike somewhere on the rock of the organic. I have no hesitation in regarding even memory-traces as scars, so to speak, of traumatic impressions, i.e., as products of the destructive instinct, which, however, the unresting Eros nevertheless understands how to employ for its own ends, i.e. for the preservation of life. Out of these it shapes a new psychical system, which enables the ego to orientate itself more correctly in its environment, and to form sounder judgements. In fact it is only the destructive instinct that “wills evil”, while it is Eros that “creates good” out of it.
I have spoken once or twice about a reckoning-machine, the existence of which I assumed as an auxiliary organ of the sense of reality. This idea really belongs to another connection, which to my mind explains the scientific mathematical and logical sense, but I should like to make a reference, although briefly, to it here. I can make a very useful beginning with the double meaning of the word “reckon”. When the tendency to set aside the surrounding world by means of repression or denial is given up, we begin to reckon with it, i.e. to recognize it as a fact. A further advance in the art of reckoning is, in my opinion, the development of the power to choose between two objects that occasion either more or less unpleasantness, or to choose between two modes of action that can result in either more or less unpleasantness. The whole process of thinking would then be such a work of reckoning—to a large extent unconscious, and interposed between the sensory apparatus and motility. In this process, as in modern reckoning-machines, it is practically the result alone that comes into conscious view, while the memory-traces with which the actual work has been performed remain concealed, i.e. unconscious. We can dimly surmise that even the simplest act of thinking rests on an indefinite number of unconscious reckoning-operations, in which presumably every kind of arithmetical simplification (algebra, differential calculus) is employed; and that thinking in speech-symbols represents the ultimate integration of this complicated reckoning-faculty. I believe, too, in all seriousness that the sense for mathematics and logic depends upon the presence or absence of the capacity for perceiving this reckoning and thinking activity, though it is also performed unconsciously by those who do not seem to possess the mathematical or logical faculty in the slightest degree. The musical faculty might be ascribed to a similar introversion (self-perception of emotional stirrings, lyricism) as well as the scientific interest in psychology.
Whether and how far a given person forms “correct” judgements (i.e. the ability to reckon the future beforehand) probably depends on the degree of development this reckoning-machine has reached. The primary elements with which these reckonings are performed are our memories, but these themselves represent a sum of sensory impressions and therefore ultimately are reac-tions to various stimuli of different strength. Thus psychical mathematics would only be a continuation of “organic mathematics”.
However this may be, the essential thing in the development of a sense of reality is, as Freud has shown, the interpolation of an inhibitory mechanism into the psychical apparatus; negation is only the last desperate effort of the pleasure-principle to check the advance to a knowledge of reality. The ultimate forming of a judgement, however, resulting from the work of reckoning here postulated, represents an inner discharge, a re-orientation of our emotional attitude to things and to our ideas of them, the direction of this new orientation determining the path taken by action either immediately or some time afterwards. Recognition of the surrounding world, i.e. affirmation of the existence of something unpleasant, is, however, only possible after defence against objects which cause “pain” and denial of them are given up, and their stimuli, incorporated into the ego, transformed into inner impulses. The power that effects this transformation is the Eros that is liberated through instinctual defusion.
1. The child will learn “to distinguish from his ego the malicious things, forming an outer world, that do not obey his will”, i.e. he will distinguish subjective contents of his mind (feelings) from those which reach him objectively (sensations). “Introjection und Transference” (1909), Contributions to Psycho-analysis.
2. “Stages in the development of the sense of reality” (1913), Contributions to Psycho-analysis.
3. Group-Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). Das Ich und das Es (1923).
4. Beyond the Pleasure-Principle (1920).
5. Imago, 1925.
6. “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality”.
7. Zur Psychoanalyse der paralytischen Geistesstörung.
8. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1924.
9. Versuch einer Genitaltheorie (Internationale Psycho-Analytische Bibliothek, Vol. XV).
10. In my Genitaltheorie I trace back the feeling of gratification—the feeling of attaining erotic reality—to a similar recurrence of finding again and recognizing again.
11. Introduction to my Genitaltheorie.
12. Hysterie und Pathoneurosen.
13. Cf. S. Spielrein, “Die Destruction als Ursache des Werdens”, Jahrbuch für Psycho-Analyse, IV, 1912.
* Article citation:
Ferenczi, S. (1926). The problem of acceptance of unpleasant ideas: Advances in knowledge of the sense of reality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7: 312–323.