ABSTRACT
A patient who was in face-to-face therapy gave the analyst reasons to doubt for a long time, even though she herself had no doubts: she was enthusiastic, involved, persuaded as to the benefits of the work, whose effects she said she could distinctly measure and whose merits she bragged about to her friends and family. He struggled with this inwardly because the patient's detailed account of daily life and her discussions with those around her generally left very little room for fantasy, for unforeseen thoughts, or for the emergence of an elaborated preconscious. Negative hallucination, a phenomenon Freud observed early in his work, suffered for a long time from being a hybrid phenomenon, somewhere between a patent symptom and an unconscious process at the foundations of psychic life. Negative hallucination, as a process, thus becomes the prerequisite for many noisy clinical conditions, such as delusion.
