ABSTRACT
In 1925 Sigmund Freud was continuing to delineate what would become identified as "Freudian theory" by expanding on the revision he had already made to the concept of defence, adding denial as another form of the defensive structure of repression. As a consequence, negation has been studied extensively from grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic points of view in children acquiring many different languages. Rejection and refusal are less discussed in both research and clinical contexts, which have been dominated by explorations of the precursors to logical negation. A capacity for negation has its own course of development, during which it takes different forms. Freud builds an explanation based on his theories of libidinal investment in bodily zones and on the ego's developing capacities. Denial has been an important focus of psycholinguistic study, and a brief review of the modern era in linguistics may be helpful in explaining why.
