ABSTRACT
The notion of negative hallucination can be traced back to the heyday of hypnotism, before the birth of psychoanalysis even. Hallucinatory activity loses importance in two respects. First, the privilege—which it has sometimes enjoyed in semiology—of being a sign by means of which psychosis can be identified is erased by being included within a neurotic framework. Second, the analysis of its mechanism subordinates it to being simply one of the vicissitudes of the return of the repressed. Sigmund Freud probably underestimated with the patient the part played by psychic work in the subject's relations to perception, for he was entirely preoccupied with the analysis of representations, the memories of infantile neurosis, and the reconstitution of the primal scene. In the case of the "Wolf Man", the childhood object of denial returns by means of a temporary hallucination and also as an anxiety-provoking repetitive dream.
