3003

IV. TOPOGRAPHY AND DYNAMICS OF REPRESSION

We have arrived at the conclusion that repression is essentially a process affecting ideas on the border between the systems Ucs. and Pcs. (Cs.), and we can now make a fresh attempt to describe the process in greater detail.

It must be a matter of a withdrawal of cathexis; but the question is, in which system does the withdrawal take place and to which system does the cathexis that is withdrawn belong? The repressed idea remains capable of action in the Ucs., and it must therefore have retained its cathexis. What has been withdrawn must be something else. Let us take the case of repression proper ( after-pressure’), as it affects an idea which is preconscious or even actually conscious. Here repression can only consist in withdrawing from the idea the (preconscious cathexis which belongs to the system Pcs. The idea then either remains uncathected, or receives cathexis from the Ucs., or retains the Ucs. cathexis which it already had. Thus there is a withdrawal of the preconscious cathexis, retention of the unconscious cathexis, or replacement of the preconscious cathexis by an unconscious one. We notice, moreover, that we have based these reflections (as it were, without meaning to) on the assumption that the transition from the system Ucs. to the system next to it is not effected through the making of a new registration but through a change in its state, an alteration in its cathexis. The functional hypothesis has here easily defeated the topographical one.

But this process of withdrawal of libido is not adequate to make another characteristic of repression comprehensible to us. It is not clear why the idea which has remained cathected or has received cathexis from the Ucs. should not, in virtue of its cathexis, renew the attempt to penetrate into the system Pcs. If it could do so, the withdrawal of libido from it would have to be repeated, and the same performance would go on endlessly; but the outcome would not be repression. So, too, when it comes to describing primal repression, the mechanism just discussed of withdrawal of preconscious cathexis would fail to meet the case; for here we are dealing with an unconscious idea which has as yet received no cathexis from the Pcs. and therefore cannot have that cathexis withdrawn from it.