be, not two, but at least three cathexes in play. Thus, in Freud’s example in the last quote above, there is a quantity drawn towards a facilitated contact-barrier by a second quantity on the other side, but held back by a third quantity acting from another direction (two magnets with opposite poles will fly together, but a judiciously positioned third magnet could hold the second immobile between itself and the first). Freud actually draws a diagram to show this necessity of three positions (1950: 324), and how this result could be achieved is what concerns him, when, towards the end of the Project, he addresses what he calls “the most obscure problem: the origin of the ‘ego’ – that is, of a complex of neurones which hold fast to their cathexis”, i.e., which achieve the objective of what, in Beyond, he calls “quiescent cathexis”. Here is what he says:
The ego consists originally of the nuclear neurones, which receive endogenous Qή through paths of conduction […]. The experience of satisfaction has brought about an association between this nucleus and a perceptual image (the wishful image) and information of a movement … The education and development of this original ego takes place in a repetitive state of craving, in expectation. It [the ego] learns first that it must not cathect the motor images, so that discharge results, until certain conditions have been fulfilled from the direction of the perception. It learns further that it must not cathect the wishful idea beyond a certain amount since otherwise it would deceive itself in a hallucinatory manner.
(1950: 369)
So the ego is initially the nuclear neurones, i.e., one of the items in the three-way facilitation created by the experience of satisfaction. The risk, described here, that it will deceive itself “in a hallucinatory manner” depends on a bizarre exception, specified earlier in the text, to the ω mechanism, namely: “if the wished-for object is abundantly cathected […] the same indication of discharge or of reality follows too as in the case of external perception” (1950: 325). The idea seems to be that over-cathexis of the wishful image produces the “period” that stimulates ω, i.e. produces consciousness, and information of the ω discharge makes the ego believe that it is dealing with a perception and not a memory. But what Freud says at the end of this