Displacement

displacements of intensity between its elements necessarily br psychical transvaluation of the material… another sort exists and reveals itself in a change in the verbal expression of the thoughts

Freud identifies two distinct species of displacement — substitution of ideational elements along associative chains, and replacement of abstract thought by pictorial or concrete verbal expression — establishing the mechanism's dual structural role in dreamwork.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis

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the essential elements, charged, as they are, with intense interest, may be treated as though they were of small value, and their place may be taken in the dream by other elements, of whose small value in the dream-thoughts there can be no question

Freud demonstrates that dream-formation systematically inverts psychical valuation, displacing high-intensity elements in favour of low-intensity ones, constituting the primary evidence for displacement as an active distortion mechanism.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis

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children displace some of their feelings from their father on to an animal. Analysis is able to trace the associative paths along which this displacement passes — both the fortuitous paths and those with a significant content.

Freud extends displacement from dream psychology to the social-developmental sphere, arguing that the boy's ambivalent paternal affect is displaced onto an animal totem along traceable associative pathways, grounding totemism in Oedipal dynamics.

Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis

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it seems probable that in the first system the unpleasure principle regulates the displacement of cathexis automatically

Freud links displacement to the economic regulation of psychical energy, arguing that the unpleasure principle governs automatic displacement of cathexis within the primary process system.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting

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the transposition of an affect on to indifferent ideas. If this takes place, obsessional symptoms develop. Like repression, this process of transposition on to indifferent ideas occurs in dementia praecox just as it does in the neuroses.

Abraham extends the displacement mechanism beyond neurosis to dementia praecox, treating the transposition of affect onto indifferent ideas as a shared psychopathological operation that bridges Freudian obsessional and psychotic formations.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting

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Displacement, 22, 27

Bulkeley's index confirms displacement as a discrete and indexed technical concept in the psychology of dreaming, catalogued alongside condensation and considerations of representability as a core Freudian dreamwork mechanism.

Bulkeley, Kelly, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming, 2017supporting

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Her constant association to poisoning was her husband whom she praised in such high tones that one suspected her to have something against him.

Bleuler's clinical vignette illustrates, without naming it explicitly, the displacement of hostile affect from the husband onto the pharmacist, offering a phenomenological instance of the mechanism at work in schizophrenic symptom formation.

Bleuler, Eugen, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911aside

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the figure of Irma acquired still other features without any alteration occurring in the visual picture of her in the dream. She turned into one of the children… The same calcitrance over opening her mouth brought an allusion to a lady

Freud's self-analysis of the Irma dream demonstrates condensation and displacement operating jointly, as one figure absorbs the emotional valences of multiple persons through associative substitution.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900aside

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