ABSTRACT
R. A. Spitz recognizes that the concept of negation and the constant use of the semantic ‘no’ for communication are specifically human patterns. Negation characterizes a relationship, not an object. Negation does not have a specific place within language; language as a whole is sustained by negation. The system of opposites that A. Freud traces through the example of negation continued to obsess him. It makes an appearance in quite unrelated situations. In ‘Constructions in analysis’ Freud is still very much involved with his work on negation, which was by then twelve years old. He tells that the work of analysis ‘is carried on in two separate localities, that it involves two people, to each of whom a distinct task is assigned’. All of modern psychoanalysis gets enmeshed in the type of contradiction Freud is referring to: persons-things. It is less an opposition between animate and inanimate than between persons and objects.
