the one facilitated contact-barrier. A side-cathexis thus acts as an inhibition of the course of Qη.
(1950: 323)
(“Qη” is the abbreviation that Freud uses for “quantity in the mental apparatus”.) It is clear from a moment’s thought that inhibition (binding) by side-cathexis is really the exact same thing as the “association by simultaneity”, which Freud had described a few pages earlier in the Project and equated with consciousness in his “slip”, since it relies on the mutual attraction between quantities (“cathexes”) based on their simultaneous presence in several neurones. The fact that free flow between elements and its exact opposite – the inhibition (binding) of free flow between elements – depend on one and the same mechanism is very striking, because such free flow (arriving from inside the body) is precisely what Freud would describe in Beyond as the drive (“Trieb”) and the question, on which I left Beyond, was what to make of Freud’s paradoxical suggestion that the repetition compulsion (aka the death drive) is a drive whose function is… to bind the drive. So, in the Project and in Beyond, what is definitive of free flow (association by simultaneity in the former and the drive in the latter) is just what binds the free flow.
I already wondered whether the reason why Freud, in the Project, conjures up the ω-system as a mask for the simple free-flow definition of consciousness might be the repetition, which the detour via ω entails (the passage from object image to motor image is travelled twice). Can it be shown that, in the Project, the repetition implicit in the ω mechanism is identical with inhibition (binding)? If it can, we may have answers to the two principal questions, which I posed earlier: why does Freud take both consciousness and trauma to be a matter of free flow, and how is repetition supposed to bind free flow?
Consider in more detail what Freud does with association by simultaneity. In order for the mechanism to be used as the tool of inhibition, making quantities remain separate and stand still (the objective of inhibition) instead of making them flow into each other (as when the mechanism is first introduced, along with the “rogue” definition of consciousness), there would have to