image from the experience of satisfaction because the satisfying object is again present. But, as I pointed out, the explanation looks hopeless because, firstly, Freud seems to give himself this ego as a little man inside man, with no explanation of where it came from, and, secondly, he absurdly has the ego refraining from over-cathexis of the object image in order to prevent self-deception (but if it refrains, it is already “in the know”, so the deception is a fiction).
The solution to these riddles is, I think, like a psychoanalytic interpretation, surprising. The point is that the ego is created by the repetition based on ω. This repetition of two items separately from each other – motor image followed by motor image – is the holding apart of two signifiers (the time has come to use the word) and precisely this “holding apart” is inhibition or binding (prevention of coalescence).8 ((In Lacanian terms it is the progress from “alienation” to “separation” (Lacan, 1977: 218). )) It is also the repression of one of the signifiers, which will now stand for the “thing” or the “nucleus of the ego”. The arrangement left behind by the experience of satisfaction is not what Freud pretends it to be, a means of experiencing the same satisfaction again, but a means of repressing that satisfaction (this could be demonstrated, if there was space, by showing that the “experience of pain”, which Freud describes next in the Project, is really the exact same thing as the experience of satisfaction, and that the consequences of the experiences are identical).
I am painfully aware that these last explanations are (space dictates) much too concise. As a sort of coda, let me add something that could give an intuitive glimpse of the key point. Lacan asserts that, if we read Freud carefully in many of his works, particularly the “Wolf Man” case history, it can be deduced that the determinant of psychosis is the failure of repression. Lacan takes an interest, at several points in his work, in a renowned philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom he judges, from reading his texts, to have been psychotic (Lacan, 2007 [1991]: 59-64). Lacan comments only on Wittgenstein’s early work, the Tractatus, but if he is right about the philosopher’s psychosis, we may well expect to find relevant clues in the later work too,