Abstract
Biblical, religious, philosophical and metaphysical ideas are surprisingly in unison in assigning priority or ultimate victory to “nothingness” over “being. ” Thus, in the Bible tohoo-wabohoo, that is, chaos, was before creation; as Abraham Ibn Ezra (ca 1200 A.D.) tersely states: “yesh meayin”
, that is “something from nothing. ” Heidegger (1971) postulates that anxiety of “nothingness” fills “being” and Freud (1920) speaks of the great strength of thanatos that strives toward maximum entropy, that is, toward disorder, the negative of biological existence. Freud concludes in his exposition on “Negation” (1925) that the death drive is the source of all “No, ” of the negative in general, of repression and denial, disavowal, and refusal. On the other hand, he declares, all affirmation and assertion stem from eros, the uniting force of the life drive.
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© 1989 Plenum Press, New York
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Wangh, M. (1989). The Evolution of Psychoanalytic Thought on Negation and Denial. In: Edelstein, E.L., Nathanson, D.L., Stone, A.M. (eds) Denial. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0737-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0737-2_1
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