Displacement (psychoanalysis)

Comings and goings

To be driven

Displacement evokes the movement indeed; it is that it is Vecteur of activity. If the Me does not know how to deal with problem, it moves this problem - a too powerful interest - on another representation. It will be then possible to be devoted to a substitute activity with a more complete satisfaction for the desire.

In this direction, it would be even possible to bring displacement closer to the sublimation. There is however an essential difference: it is that displacement is a mechanism nevrotic: it supposes a certain blindness.

To turn in round

This movement, this psychic operation like possibility of treating the excitation, should not hide the instinctual destiny which displacement supposes. If it Me is caught interest for a substitute activity (of Pensée was activity), it will not be able truly to solve the tension which pushes it to move. There is thus there short-term solution: primary education Benefit, even, following the achievements secondary Benefit; however nothing solves the tension, ignored without lawsuit in addition to measurement.

The activity of displacement thus leads the subject to turn in round. Ego thinks of doing what it has to do but fails its principal task - the psychic Appareil does not take so much any more counts the stimuli of them, since it is directed on a replacement solution not coinciding finally more with reality of the Désir.

Affect and representation

Sigmund Freud distinguishes Affect and representation, two psychic delegations of the Pulsion. The representation is object but pattern recognition, especially worthy of interest, this interest which cannot be dissociated, in Psychanalyse at least, of the representation. The Affect, him, gets along like species of translation - indeed, it is presented in the form of a qualitative equivalent of a done everything force of quantities. The impulse is thus expressed, in the psychic one, by the affect and the representation.

Displacement supposes such a distinction. It requires in fact, like preliminary psychic operations, Refoulement and insulation; the insulation is separation between affect and representation.

But the insulation can lead to good of other destinies that to displacement. This last is privileged, primarily, in the Obsessional neurosis. In this neurosis, an alleviating representation however becomes obsessing and starts to pose problem. It is that, as one saw, displacement does not allow (at least, not enough) to solve the tension.

One also speaks about displacement in the Phobie: a representation is done alarming, where the affect comes from a fear much more comprehensible. Here, the point of importance is not to confuse this phobic mechanism with the projection psychotic, which precisely starts on a failure of repression.

Displacement also forms part of the Dream-work, in what the big parts of the Manifest content of the dream actually prove unimportant as for the Latent content, and reciprocally. This oneiric displacement proves more marked in the irrational dreams.

Lastly, let us note that the displacement led to a attitude seeming absurd. It is precisely an attitude of pretense, psychic play turning badly, since the affect is indeed justified . What it is necessary to understand by this word is not that the neurotic has Raison to feel, besides but that the birth of the affect, its formation, is not in itself abnormal - an absence of this affect, as in the operational Pensée, raises much more questions…
There is thus misunderstanding: obsession or the phobias appears badly comprehensible, but refers to a sensitivity which itself is mark of psychic life. And this misunderstanding initially addresses to the neurotic himself, since it is well the first with mésentendre his desire.

Métonymie

According to a structuralist approach, Jacques Lacan presents displacement like metonymy; this mechanism is seized there like defining the whole by the acessoire. Indeed, to move the value of the representations, to move the direction on the detail of no importance take well, in the final analysis, the aspect of a stylistic device.

See too

Métonymie of the desire

Summary bibliography

Sigmund Freud, the interpretation of the dreams , 1900, PUF
Jacques Lacan, Function and field of the praole and the language in psychoanalysis , in Writings

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