Displacement (psychology) - Freud

Freud

'For Freud, displacement (a primary process) means the transference of physical intensities...along an "associative path," so that strongly cathected ideas have their charge displaced onto other, less strongly cathected ones. This process is active in the formation of hysterical or obsessional symptoms, in the dream work, in the production of jokes, and in the transference'.

A major 'achievement of the dream-work is displacement....It manifests itself in two ways: in the first, a latent element is replaced not by a component part of itself but by something more remote - that is, by an allusion; and in the second, the psychical accent is shifted from an important element on to another which is unimportant'. Freud considered that 'displacement is the principle means used in the dream-distortion...displacement or shifting of accent - which in conscious thinking we come across only as faulty reasoning or as means for a joke'.

As well as dream-work and jokes, Freud considered that 'it is an inherent characteristic in the psychology of the obsessional neurotic to make the fullest possible use of the mechanism of displacement...especially apt to become displaced on to what is most insignificant and small'.

Subsequently, 'it was above all in the process of refining the analysis of the transference during treatment and its different manifestations — lateral, indirect, and direct transference (Freud, 1915a; Sándor Ferenczi, 1909/1994; Michel Neyraut, 1974) — that the notion of displacement was expanded'.