ABSTRACT
The text of ‘Formulations’ has a circular structure. At the end of the brief essay — in the very last line — requesting a good-natured disposition and an affectionate sympathy in the reader, Freud suggests that he or she pay attention to the performative aspect of the text, the plane in which enunciation and action coincide. The limits that Freud honestly acknowledges, and that he places under the aegis of recognition of the reality principle while trying to pass beyond them, will be crossed by Bion; for example, with his concept of the protomental system. Freud begins to abandon the pleasure principle for the dominance of the reality principle. Freud writes that, against his will, he feels constrained to enunciate things about which he would stay silent if he could. Freud continually had to go further in renouncing the positivist dream aroused in him by his own ‘pleasure principle’ of decoding the truth of the unconscious.
