in the external world. The implication, based on everything Freud says, is that the intensity of internal excitation is roughly equal to that of external excitation, which has been filtered through the protective shield by the sense organs. However, he then says, at the start of section 5 of Beyond, that internal excitation can, nevertheless, “occasion economic disturbances comparable with traumatic neuroses”. He adds that “the most abundant sources of this internal excitation are what are described as the organism’s ‘drives’ – the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the mental apparatus”. 2 ((Here and everywhere I will use “drive” to translate Freud’s “Trieb” instead of “instinct”, used in the Standard Edition, including substitution in quotes from the Standard Edition. The emendation is now generally accepted.)) It quickly becomes clear that Freud takes the drives to be traumatic as such, regardless of their intensity. He writes, for example, that “it would be the task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind the drive excitation” (1920g: 34).
This is puzzling. If the intensity of drive excitation is no greater than that of external excitation, which has been filtered and damped down to manageable levels by its conveyance to the mental apparatus via the sense organs, why does drive excitationneed to be bound? The correct answer to this, I would suggest, is that, in Freud’s system (despite some appearances to the contrary), the reason why excitation is traumatic is not its intensity. Excitation is traumatic simply because it is in free flow, which, as he makes clear, is the common feature of the drives and of “breakthrough” excitation from the outside world. The task, therefore, is to define exactly what Freud means by free flow and what he means by binding of that free flow. It is also to be noted that, if free flow is traumatic by nature, then the closeness (or identity?) between trauma and consciousness, which Freud also defines as free flow, is confirmed. This is really very surprising, in view of the peaceful and contemplative connotations, which the concept of consciousness often has in our understanding (something like gazing at a picture).
Having introduced the drives, at the start of section 5, Freud embarks on a fascinating equivocation. He returns to the examples of repetition that he discussed at the start of the essay – a child repeating the mother’s departure in play and a patient in psychoanalysis repeating Oedipal disappointments – and says that these “manifestations of a compulsion to repeat … exhibit to