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What we require, therefore, is another process which maintains the repression in the first case and, in the second, ensures its being established as well as continued. This other process can only be found in the assumption of an anticathexis, by means of which the system Pcs. protects itself from the pressure upon it of the unconscious idea. We shall see from clinical examples how such an anticathexis, operating in the system Pcs., manifests itself. It is this which represents the permanent expenditure of a primal repression, and which also guarantees the permanence of that repression. Anticathexis is the sole mechanism of primal repression; in the case of repression proper (‘after-pressure’) there is in addition withdrawal of the Pcs. cathexis. It is very possible that it is precisely the cathexis which is withdrawn from the idea that is used for anticathexis.

We see how we have gradually been led into adopting a third point of view in our account of psychical phenomena. Besides the dynamic and the topographical points of view, we have adopted the economic one. This endeavours to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude.

It will not be unreasonable to give a special name to this whole way of regarding our subject-matter, for it is the consummation of psycho-analytic research. I propose that when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a metapsychological presentation. We must say at once that in the present state of our knowledge there are only a few points at which we shall succeed in this.