Ask first: what is the purpose of the indications of reality? Mechanistically, their principal role is to signal that quantity can be allowed to flow into the motor image in the three-way facilitation (between the nuclear neurones, object image and motor image), which was left over from the original satisfying experience. The arrival of the indication of reality proves that this is expedient because it proves that the object is, once again, really there, so activation of the motor image (sucking on the breast) will bring real satisfaction (1950: 325).
Pause now and wonder: what was Freud thinking of when he invented this weird, Heath-Robinson ω mechanism? Consider again Freud’s “rogue” definition of consciousness as the passage of quantity between two neurones that were once simultaneously cathected. Judged by the (weird, but nevertheless) “official”, ω-neurone account of consciousness, it is a slip. Psychoanalysis seeks meaning in slips. So what does Freud’s slip mean? In the official account, ω excitation and hence the indication of reality are provoked by the perception of an object, and if the object is one which has been previously perceived and a memory of which is included in the three-way facilitation, quantity is then allowed to flow to the facilitated motor image. Now, Freud has it that the perceptual image and the memory image somehow share the same neurones (or perhaps are the same neurones – here again we have the neurology/psychology nonchalance). He says, for example, that what is brought into the three-way facilitation as a memory, when the facilitation is set up, is “the cathexis of one (or several) of the neurones which correspond to the perception of an object” (1950: 318). Effectively, perceptual image and memory image are one and the same, but the first is with and the second without the special “period” that marks an origin in the outside world. Consider this in the light of what I pointed out two paragraphs back, that the information of discharge from the ω system – the “indication of reality” – is a motor image. The implication is as follows: when there is a new perception of the same satisfying object, which was experienced earlier, the object image, in its role as perception, arouses a motor image (information of discharge from the ω