Substitution

SUBSTITUTION, the replacement of a complex associative group by some single element of the latter or even by a separate image not directly entering into its composition, but standing with it only in a certain connection. This concept was introduced into psychopathology by Freud (S. Freud), originally to explain the dynamics of dreams. According to Freud, the manifest content of a dream, composed of entirely different material from its actual content (the latent content), as it were, substitutes for the latter in the sleeping person's consciousness. The fact is that the actual content of dreams always has, according to Freud, a sexual basis and corresponds to the subject's infantile drives that have undergone repression as being incompatible with the moral and social attitudes of the personality (the super-ego). Therefore, although it finds expression in dream images, this expression is not direct, but distorted, as if having passed through a censorship, with thoughts and desires not passed by the latter being replaced by images and situations that seem innocent to a superficial glance, but in reality symbolically express (substitute for) the tendencies held back by the censorship. Such substitute images usually arise in those places of the situation appearing in the dream that are subject to a special affective emphasis and are centers gathering around themselves the greatest amount of psychic energy. Things happen as if a certain "psychic power" on the one hand deprives truly important psychic elements of their force, and on the other hand "creates new values" from unimportant ones. Thus, the process of substitution is associated with dynamic transformation, specifically the displacement of psychic energy from some elements to others. From the foregoing, it is clear that dream symbolism is based precisely on substitution. Like condensation, which is related to it, substitution characterizes not only dream work, but also symbolic symptom formation in the picture of neuroses (obsessive thoughts, phobias, bodily phenomena symbolizing affective states, e.g., vomiting-disgust, etc.) and the symbolism of schizophrenic speech, delusions, and hallucinations, as well as figurative "archaically primitive" thinking, and even certain forms of poetic creation. The concept of substitution (completely independently of the general assessment of psychoanalysis as a whole) must be recognized as an extremely important auxiliary tool of psychopathological analysis, making it possible in many cases to penetrate into the very foundations of the mechanisms of affective thinking.