and psychosis, Freud emphasizes even more emphatically their similarities, specifically their respective relationships with the “real world.” Highlighting the difference, he reiterates that “neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id,” whereas psychosis is the result of an analogous conflict “between the ego and the external world.” However, he quickly adds that “every neurosis disturbs the patient’s relation to reality in some way, that it serves him [her] as a means of withdrawing from reality, and that, in its severe forms, it actually signifies a flight from real life” (1961f, 183; emphasis added).
Freud’s distinction between these two forms of psychopathology—the neurotic’s compliance with reality on the one hand and the psychotic’s disregard for reality on the other—appears to be compromised by the observation that the neurotic, too, is capable of “taking flight from real life.” But Freud resolves this seeming contradiction by qualifying the two steps that are essential in the formation of every neurosis. Step one entails the ego’s repression of its (id’s) desire. This step, however, isn’t specifically neurotic. Neurosis, rather, consists in step two. As a consequence of repression and its failure, the ego tries to compensate for the damage to the id that resulted from its efforts to repress it in the first place. Hence, the loosening of the ego’s relationship “to reality is a consequence of this second step in the formation of a neurosis” (183).
Of course, there isn’t anything new in Freud’s characterization of neurosis “as the result of a repression that has failed” (183). That the return of the repressed—rather than the act of repression itself—constituted neurosis was noted in his correspondence to Fliess in 1896. Later, his increasing interest in the ego and its relationship with reality led him to look at this problem from a fresh angle. At the same time that he wrote these two papers, Freud wrote a third dealing with “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1961b). In that study he distinguished between two types of repression in the context of the Oedipus complex.
After its [the Oedipus complex] dissolution takes place, it succumbs to repression, as we say, and is followed by the latency period. It has not yet become clear, however, what it is that brings about its destruction. Analyses seem to show that it is the experience of painful disappointment. (173; emphasis added)
Freud’s use of the term repression is ambiguous. It is used to characterize a total, or “successful,” repression on the one hand, as well as those acts of repression that are only partial, or unsuccessful, on the other. The expression, “dissolution of the Oedipus complex” refers to the successful type, whereas, if the complex isn’t actually “dissolved,” it is destined to return in the form of a neurotic symptom. Anticipating our objections to this ambiguity, Freud defends his use of this term as synonymous with the more radical dissolution of the original complex:
I see no reason for denying the name of a “repression” to the ego’s turning away from the Oedipus complex. . . . But the process we have described is more than a repression. It is equivalent, if it is ideally carried out, to a destruction and an abolition of the complex. We may plausibly assume that we have here come upon the borderline—never a very sharply drawn one—between the normal and the pathological. If the ego has in fact not achieved much more than a repression of the complex, the latter persists in an unconscious state in the id and will later manifest its pathogenic effect. (177; emphasis in original)
If we assume, however, that the origin of all neuroses lies in the failure to “dissolve” our (Oedipal) demands for satisfaction, surely the resolution of future, adult neuroses rests on the same principle, which is to say, the ability to “dissolve” that demand when it arises. How, then, does Freud conceptualize the difference between merely repressing libidinal urges on the one hand, and dissolving them on the other? The preconditions for onset of neurosis are determined by (a) failure of the ego to fully repress (i.e., dissolve) the id’s demands, so it displaces them instead onto symptoms, or (b) the relative strength between the id’s demands and the ego’s repressive forces though, according to Freud, an inordinately powerful id is consistent with the onset of psychosis. How does Freud imagine resolving these conflicting forces in terms other than the ego’s success at repression itself? As we shall see, this question suggests no clear answer.
Having suggested that the neurotic, like the psychotic, is capable of losing his grip on reality, Freud examines more closely the psychotic’s relationship with frustration. He gives the example of a former patient, a young woman who, at the time, was in love with her sister’s husband. “Standing beside her sister’s death-bed, she was horrified at having the thought: ‘Now he is free and can marry me’” (1961f, 184). She became so guilt-ridden by this sudden eruption of passion that she developed an amnesia of the incident. The repression of her wish, consequently, led to a conversion hysteria. The specifically neurotic component of this resolution to her distress, according to Freud, is that “it took away from the value of the change that had occurred in reality, by repressing the instinctual demand which had emerged—that is, her love for her brother-in-law” (184). On the other hand, had she developed a psychotic response to her anguish, her “reaction would have been a disavowal of the fact of her sister’s death” (184; emphasis added).
Just as two steps are necessary to generate a neurosis, two steps are also required for the development of a psychosis. Whereas repression of the id entails the first step in a neurosis, psychosis follows a disavowal of reality. And just as the second step in a neurosis—in fact, the neurosis itself—establishes a compensation toward the damage done to the id by displacing the repressed desire onto a symptom, one would expect the second-stage movement in the psychosis to “make good” the damage done to reality. “The second step of the psychosis is indeed intended to make good the loss of reality, not, however, at the expense of a restriction of the id—as happens in neurosis at the expense of the relation to reality—but in another, more autocratic manner, by the creation of a new reality which no longer raises the same objections as the old one that has been given up” (184–85).
The apparent differences between neurosis and psychosis diminish in their respective second stages. Each is supported by the same trends. The second stage in both neurosis and psychosis is designed to aid the id in its aversion to reality. Both represent “a rebellion on the part of the id against the external world, of its unwillingness—or, if one prefers, its incapacity—to adapt itself to the exigencies of reality, to Avayxn [Necessity]” (185). But now the distinctions become more complicated. Having suggested that neurosis and psychosis differ more in their first reaction to reality than in the second, “reparative,” response, Freud attempts to separate their respective outcomes. “In neurosis a piece of reality is avoided by a sort of flight, whereas in psychosis it is remodelled. Or we might say: in psychosis, the initial flight is succeeded by an active phase of remodelling; in neurosis, the initial obedience is succeeded by a deferred attempt at flight. Or again, expressed in yet another way: neurosis does not disavow the reality; it only ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it” (185). The basic difference seems to revolve around what he means by avoid or flight on the one hand, and the terms remodel and disavow on the other. Obviously, the key to these distinctions should ultimately rest on what Freud means by reality, because his argument rests on the proposition that (a) the neurotic merely ignores reality and takes flight from it, whereas (b) the psychotic disavows reality and attempts to remodel it. Freud suggested that, ideally, the healthy individual combines aspects of both the neurotic and psychotic, when his behavior “disavows the reality as little as does a neurosis, but [if] it then exerts itself, as does a psychosis, to effect an alteration of that reality” (185).
What, however, is the nature of this reality that we seek to disavow while striving to alter it? Freud suggests that reality is essentially perceptual. In fact, the psychotics’ wish to alter it is potentially healthy, if only they didn’t need to “disavow” it beforehand. Their decision to reject reality in the first place leads them to alter their perceptions of what is real by way of hallucinations, so they become “faced with the task of procuring for [themselves] perceptions of a kind
