hand] and between the changing cathexes in the pallium and the inconstant component [on the other]; it [language] will call neurone a the thing and neurone b its activity or attribute – in short, its predicate.
(1950: 328)
Again, I cannot follow all the ramifications of this here, but what matters for present purposes is that Freud has made both the ego and the object image (“perceptual complex”) consist of two parts, supposed a “resemblance” between the ego and the object image, and taken the two parts of the object image to be a “thing”, on the one hand, and “activity”, “attribute” or “predicate” on the other.
This is at first bewildering. The experience of satisfaction left a facilitation between three items. Now Freud tells us that two of these items (object image and ego) each consist of two parts. Does that make a total of five facilitated items? Not at all. What Freud means to do, I believe, by these extra complications is to illustrate the tension I just described between three, two and one item, which is implicit in association by simultaneity and inhibition. The two components of the object image, which Freud specifies, are: on the one hand, the “thing”, which, if Freud had not suddenly introduced this new complication, we would naturally take to be the whole of the image; and, on the other hand, what he calls an “activity”. Now, an “activity” (German “Tätigkeit”) sounds remarkably like a motor image. What Freud has actually done, I believe, is to fold away what were two out of the three items in the three-way facilitation from the experience of satisfaction (object image and motor image) into one of the items (object image). If that is right, what becomes of the third item in the facilitation – the nuclear neurones, which Freud calls the “original ego”?
To answer that, consider the “resemblance”, which Freud posits here between the object image (the perceptual cathexis) and the ego. There is nothing anywhere else in the Project to indicate a resemblance between the ego and the object image or what such a resemblance could possibly consist in. The only resemblance is just the dual structure, posited here, of constant and changing components, which ego and object image are supposed to share. I think that what Freud would like to say (I will consider in a moment why he cannot in fact say it) is that the ego and the object image are one and the same.