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If we ask ourselves what it is that gives the character of strangeness to
the substitutive formation and the symptom in schizophrenia, we eventually come
to realize that it is the predominance of what has to do with words over what
has to do with things. As far as the thing goes, there is only a very slight
similarity between squeezing out a blackhead and an emission from the penis, and
still less similarity between the innumerable shallow pores of the skin and the
vagina; but in the former case there is, in both instances, a ‘spurting out’,
while in the latter the cynical saying, ‘a hole is a hole’, is true verbally.
What has dictated the substitution is not the resemblance between the things
denoted but the sameness of the words used to express them. Where the two - word and
thing - do not coincide, the formation of substitutes in schizophrenia
deviates from that in the transference neuroses.
If now we put this finding alongside the hypothesis that in schizophrenia
object-cathexes are given up, we shall be obliged to modify the hypothesis by
adding that the cathexis of the word-presentations of objects is retained. What we have permissibly called the
conscious presentation of the object can now be split up into the presentation of
the word and the presentation of the thing; the latter consists in the cathexis, if not of the direct memory-images of
the thing, at least of remoter memory-traces derived from these. We now seem to
know all at once what the difference is between a conscious and an unconscious
presentation. The two are not, as we supposed, different registrations of the
same content in different psychical localities, nor yet different functional
states of cathexis in the same locality; but the conscious presentation comprises
the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to
it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone.
The system Ucs. contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and true
object-cathexes; the system Pcs. comes about by this thing-presentation being hypercathected through being
linked with the word-presentations corresponding to it. It is these hypercathexes,
we may suppose, that bring about a higher psychical organization and make it
possible for the primary process to be succeeded by the secondary process which
is dominant in the Pcs. Now, too, we are in a position to state precisely what it is that repression
denies to the rejected presentation in the transference neuroses: what it
denies to the presentation is translation into words which shall remain attached to
the object. A presentation which is not put into words, or a psychical act
which is not hypercathected, remains thereafter in the Ucs. in a state of repression.