last passage looks like nonsense. What could it mean for the ego (apparently intentionally) to not over-cathect the image for fear of “deceiving itself”? After all, if it knows not to over-cathect the image for that reason, it must already knowthat the image is not a perception! More generally, what does Freud think he has said in these five sentences that could explain how vessels filled with quantity (the nuclear neurones) become what sounds like a little man inside man, who gets “educated” and “learns” things?
Freud himself writes, a few paragraphs after the last passage: “How primary defence, non-cathexis owing to a threat of unpleasure, is to be represented mechanically – this, I confess, I am unable to say (1950: 370). Frank Sulloway concluded that Freud in the Project, failed “to provide a mechanical explanation for defense against unpleasure without having to assume the existence of an ‘observing’ ego” (Sulloway, 1979: 125).
I think, though, that Freud does offer an explanation of “non-cathexis owing to a threat of unpleasure” – aka binding, inhibition or primary defence – in these sentences, only it is not a mechanical explanation and Freud’s ego is not the psychological ego (the “little man inside man”) which Sulloway clearly takes it to be.
To see this, consider the word “education” (in the sentence that begins, “The education and development of this original ego”). Strachey inserts a footnote after the word, where he tells the reader that the manuscript “quite clearly” has “Entzieh(un)g”4 ((The two letters “un” are bracketed because Freud uses a shorthand in the Project, leaving out letters in words if a German reader could supply the missing letters him/herself.)) (“withdrawal”), but that he follows the German editors who “very plausibly” emended this to “Erziehung” (“education”). The editors were presumably moved to do this by the occurrence of the verb “lernen” (“learn”) in the next two sentences, which made them take “Entziehung” to be a slip by Freud. It is, however, unlikely that Freud made such a slip, since a connection between the concepts of “education” and “withdrawal” is hard to imagine. Moreover, “withdrawal” has much relevance to what he is discussing here.