Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A defensive process described by Laforgue in a letter to Freud (10 May 1925) in schizophrenias . It consists in the refusal to accept an actual fact, by means of a compromise between two incompatible tendencies: love and hatred towards the mother, a compromise which extends secondarily to all those in the subject's circle. Scotomization resembles a blindness of the mind, which enables the subject to compensate for certain failures and a fall in self-esteem. In Laforgue's conception, scotomization is the opposite of repression, since, by contrast, it is the saturated expression of a quest for unattainable objects. ‘We believe we can put down the misrecognition of reality to scotomization, which corresponds to the infantile – and thus unrepressed – desire not to acknowledge the outside world but rather to set one's own ego in its place’ (letter of Laforgue to Freud, 10 May 1925, quoted in Lilamand, 1980). All the attention, instead of being concentrated on the chosen subject or the persons present is, by contrast, dispersed over events, signals and indices perceived outside the situation currently being experienced. j.m. ... log in or subscribe to read full text