This can be seen by referring back to what I said above: Freud’s association by simultaneity means that two quantities cannot remain separate, but instantly flow together or coalesce, and inhibition (binding) is the art of using this self-same device of association by simultaneity to achieve the opposite result – to keep quantities apart by drawing them away from each other. I explained that inhibition would necessarily involve at least three positions, while coalescence occurs between two positions. So, if you have association by simultaneity with just two positions and no more, what has to be done is, precisely, to withdraw quantity from these two positions in order to create a third, which can keep the first two apart by the judicious use of its force of attraction. It is, however, extremely hard to see how this can be done, since, far from allowing the withdrawal of quantity from their association in order to make a third position, the two quantities will, due to association by simultaneity, tend to immediately coalesce into unity.5 ((A short but irresistible remark: viewed in this way Freud’s problem matches that presented by Lacan in his sophism of 1945, Logical Time (Lacan, 2006: 161-175), where a third position, a “moment of concluding”, has to be extracted from a “time for comprehending” that has a binary structure and tends to collapse into a unitary “instant of the glance”. The match, I think, is no coincidence, since Freud, at this juncture in the Project, is stating how he understands primary defence – what he would later call “primal repression” – and Lacan’s sophism is to be understood as illustrating his (I think) correct understanding of Freudian repression. The Project and Logical Time are the first steps in the theoretical elaborations of the originator of psychoanalysis and of his French follower, steps taken exactly half a century apart.))
If withdrawal really is the mechanism that can explain the “origin of the ego” as “a complex of neurones which hold fast to their cathexis”, what exactly is the withdrawal from? When, earlier in the Project, Freud resumes discussion of the experience of satisfaction a few pages after first introducing it, he refers again to the object image in the three-way facilitation and says: “the time has come to remember that perceptual cathexes” (such as the object image) “are never cathexes of single neurones but always of complexes”. He has not mentioned this idea in the Project before this point and offers no clue where it comes from. The origin is, in fact, traceable and confirms the line of thought I am pursuing here, but I cannot go into that now. Then, a few lines further on, he writes:
The perceptual complex, if it is compared with other perceptual complexes, can be dissected into a component portion, neurone a, which on the whole remains the same, and a second component portion, neurone b, which for the most part varies. Language will later apply the term judgement to this dissection and will discover the resemblance which in fact exists between the nucleus of the ego and the constant perceptual component [on the one