ABSTRACT

The concept of the death instinct marked a change in S. Freud's thinking. Freud reconciled his new ideas with his earlier metapsychology. One of fundamental importance is the theory underlying the method of free association. It was Freud's experience in the neuroses and dreams that "when conscious purposive ideas are abandoned, concealed purposive ideas assume control of the current of ideas, and that superficial associations are only substitutes by displacement for suppressed deeper ones". The emphasis on hypothesis-testing research has devalued the contributions that exploratory studies can make to verifying Freud's theory of the mental apparatus. A suitably designed study could confirm or refute the theory that affects may interfere with the function of selective attention-a function Freud allocated to the system Perceptual-Conscious. The clinical facts described provide a practical and theoretical perspective from which to view Freud's concept of a mental apparatus.