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Let us make a tentative effort to give a metapsychological description of the process of repression in the three transference neuroses which are familiar to us. Here we may replace ‘cathexis’ by ‘libido’, because, as we know, it is the vicissitudes of sexual impulses with which we shall be dealing.

In anxiety hysteria a first phase of the process is frequently overlooked, and may perhaps be in fact missed out; on careful observation, however, it can be clearly discerned. It consists in anxiety appearing without the subject knowing what he is afraid of. We must suppose that there was present in the Ucs. some love-impulse demanding to be transposed into the system Pcs.; but the cathexis directed to it from the latter system has drawn back from the impulse (as though in an attempt at flight) and the unconscious libidinal cathexis of the rejected idea has been discharged in the form of anxiety.

On the occasion of a repetition (if there should be one) of this process, a first step is taken in the direction of mastering the unwelcome development of anxiety. The cathexis that has taken flight attaches itself to a substitutive idea which, on the one hand, is connected by association with the rejected idea, and, on the other, has escaped repression by reason of its remoteness from that idea. This substitutive idea - a ‘substitute by displacement’ - permits the still uninhibitable development of anxiety to be rationalized. It now plays the part of an anticathexis for the system Cs. (Pcs.), by securing it against an emergence in the Cs. of the repressed idea. On the other hand it is, or acts as if it were, the point of departure for the release of the anxiety-affect, which has now really become quite uninhibitable. Clinical observation shows, for instance, that a child suffering from an animal phobia experiences anxiety under two kinds of conditions: in the first place, when his repressed love-impulse becomes intensified, and, in the second, when he perceives the animal he is afraid of. The substitutive idea acts in the one instance as a point at which there is a passage across from the system Ucs. to the system Cs., and, in the other instance, as a self-sufficing source for the release of anxiety. The extending dominance of the system Cs. usually manifests itself in the fact that the first of these two modes of excitation of the substitutive idea gives place more and more to the second. The child may perhaps end by behaving as though he had no predilection whatever towards his father but had become quite free from him, and as though his fear of the animal was a real fear - except that this fear of the animal, fed as such a fear is from an unconscious instinctual source, proves obdurate and exaggerated in the face of all influences brought to bear from the system Cs., and thereby betrays its derivation from the system Ucs. - In the second phase of anxiety hysteria, therefore, the anticathexis from the system Cs. has led to substitute-formation.