If it is correct that the ego and the object image are one and the same and if the motor image folds away into the object image, then there are not, or at least not originally, three items in the facilitation left behind by the experience of satisfaction, but only one. We can call it the object image or the ego, as we please, but it is just this strange essence, poised between unity (object image or ego) and duality (thing + activity, for the object image; or nucleus + changing cathexes, for the ego).
As I have said, the indeterminacy between unity and duality is part and parcel of association by simultaneity, by which any two items tend immediately to telescope into one. Whether or not he was the first to notice it, Jacques Lacan was certainly the first to delve deeply into what Freud’s concept of association by simultaneity may have to do with the same concept as used in the structural theory of language.6 ((His favourite reference is Letter 52 to Fliess, where Freud makes association by simultaneity the first “layer” of memory registration (Freud, Fliess, 1985: 207-215).)) Something that may occur to anyone on first acquaintance with the theory of structural linguistics inaugurated by Saussure and developed by Jakobson and others is that, if the elements of language are purely differential (defined by “distinctive features”), they are not thinkable as separate, because each exists only by virtue of all the others. So the language system has a built-in capacity to coalesce into unity. Could this be what Freud means by the tendency of his elements, linked by “association by simultaneity”, to coalesce? This may seem far-fetched to anyone who is not sold on the Lacanian reading of Freud. But it is, perhaps, just as far-fetched to think that Freud, in a text as tightly organised as the Project, could have wandered (as I showed him doing above) between “mental image” and “neurone” to describe these same elements, unless he was feeling for a concept to describe them which was different from both. 7 ((This stirs the question, where on earth could Freud have come across the ideas of structural linguistics before that science was invented? Such was the first question put to Lacan in Radiophonie (Lacan, 2001: 403-407). I think there is a more concrete answer than the one he gives there. I will try to present it in a future article.))
Think now again of how the ω arrangement does two laps or goes around twice, causing the activation of first one motor image (the information of discharge from ω, which Freud expressly likens to a motor image) and then of another (the motor image from the experience of satisfaction) in what is effectively a repetition. As Freud presents it, at the superficial, “mechanistic” level of his exegesis, the information of discharge from ω lets the ego know that it can now safely release quantity to the motor