5077
(1941 [1938])
London, June.
June 16. - It is interesting that in connection with early experiences, as contrasted with later experiences, all the various reactions to them survive, of course including contradictory ones. Instead of a decision, which would have been the outcome later. Explanation: weakness of the power of synthesis, retention of the characteristic of the primary processes.
July 12. - As a substitute for penis-envy, identification with the clitoris: neatest expression of inferiority, source of all inhibitions. At the same time disavowal of the discovery that other women too are without a penis.
‘Having’ and ‘being’ in children. Children like expressing an object-relation by an identification: ‘I am the object.’ ‘Having’ is the later of the two; after loss of the object it relapses into ‘being’. Example: the breast. ‘The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.’ Only later: ‘I have it’ - that is, ‘I am not it’ . . .
July 12. - With neurotics it is as though we were in a prehistoric landscape - for instance, in the Jurassic. The great saurians are still running about; the horsetails grow as high as palms (?).
July 20. - The hypothesis of there being inherited vestiges in the id alters, so to say, our views about it.
July 20. - The individual perishes from his internal conflicts, the species perishes in its struggle with the external world to which it is no longer adapted. - This deserves to be included in Moses.
Findings, Ideas, Problems
5078
August 3. - A sense of guilt also originates from unsatisfied love. Like hate. In fact we have been obliged to derive every conceivable thing from that material: like economically self-sufficient States with their ‘Ersatz products’.
August 3. - The ultimate ground of all intellectual inhibitions and all inhibitions of work seems to be the inhibition of masturbation in childhood. But perhaps it goes deeper; perhaps it is not its inhibition by external influences but its unsatisfying nature in itself. There is always something lacking for complete discharge and satisfaction - en attendant toujours quelquechose qui ne venait point¹ - and this missing part, the reaction of orgasm, manifests itself in equivalents in other spheres, in absences, outbreaks of laughing, weeping, and perhaps other ways. - Once again infantile sexuality has fixed a model in this.
August 22. - Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it.
August 22. - Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.
¹ [‘Always waiting for something which never came’]