Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- PART I DIVIDING PERSONS
- PART II PSYCHOANALYTIC CONCEPTS
- 4 Unconscious motives and Freudian concepts
- 5 Wish
- 6 Phantasy and Kleinian explanation
- PART III PSYCHOANALYTIC CONCEPTION OF MIND
- Appendices
- Notes
- Works of Freud cited
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- PART I DIVIDING PERSONS
- PART II PSYCHOANALYTIC CONCEPTS
- 4 Unconscious motives and Freudian concepts
- 5 Wish
- 6 Phantasy and Kleinian explanation
- PART III PSYCHOANALYTIC CONCEPTION OF MIND
- Appendices
- Notes
- Works of Freud cited
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the freezing-point of the will […] To wish is a sign of recovery or mending.
NietzscheFrom experience – The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
NietzscheTHE CREATION OF WISHES
Two kinds of phenomena exemplify wish-fulfilment in its purest and most rudimentary form: infantile hallucination, and dreaming.
Freud supposes that the frustration suffered by the infant when it is deprived of nourishment, causes it to hallucinate (by drawing on a memory of) the breast, or experience of sucking, bringing it temporary relief. Wish-fulfilment in dreams is best illustrated where there is no interference from censorship, as in Anna Freud's straightforwardly appetitive dream of wild strawberries, and Freud's self-induced ‘thirst’ dreams, where his eating anchovies before going to sleep made him dream of drinking.
The representations of the infant and the dreamer are caused by wishes. Wishes are conative states whose causes, in these instances, are simple universal biological requirements, the most basic instinctual demands. Other motivational states with a more psychologically complex, less plainly biological character can play the same role. In wish-fulfilment, content is straightforwardly transposed from a wish into a representation of the wish as fulfilled.
The most basic condition in which wishes are created is when action is not possible, as in infancy or sleep; wishes then issue directly from motivational states.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis , pp. 120 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993