ABSTRACT
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. In a subsequent work, the author attempted to reconstruct theoretically the principal stages in the development from the pleasure-principle to the reality-principle. 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. 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.
