ABSTRACT
At the December 1974 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association S. Abrams and P. Neubauer presented a paper entitled "Object-orientedness: the person or the thing." Spitz (1957) recognises-as have many before him-that the concept of negation and the constant use of the semantic "no" for communication are specifically human patterns. Clinical theory is positivistic. It translates into metapsyetiological jargon the results of an observation bearing on the visible, the observable, that which testifies to the responsive mind. Negation characterizes a relationship, not an object. Negation does not have a specific place within language; language as a whole is sustained by negation. This chapter proposes the talk of counter-interpretation and counter-construction as the analysand's immediate reaction to the analyst's message. Introjection never ceases to be ambivalent. The fiction of the genital personality belongs to psychoanalytic ideology. Projection, which is not the same thing as expulsion, is the putting outside which is paralleled by the putting inside which characterizes introjection.
