Undoing (psychology) - in Psychoanalysis After Freud

In Psychoanalysis After Freud

The first psychoanalytic half-century saw several writers exploring the concept of undoing in Freud's wake. Anna Freud listed it among the ego mechanisms; Ernest Jones and Ella Freeman Sharpe both wrote articles linking it with 'actions and attitudes aimed at the undoing of imaginative destructions. Strivings for reparation may...be the main motive'. Otto Fenichel devoted a substantial section of his "mechanism of defense" to summarising past work in his encyclopaedic Theory of Neurosis: he was especially interested in how 'the undoing sometimes does not consist in a compulsion to do the opposite of what has been done previously but in a compulsion to repeat the very same act...with the opposite unconscious meaning'.

The second half of the twentieth century saw little new theoretical or creative work around the concept. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis laid stress on how 'Undoing in the pathological sense is directed at the act's very reality, and the aim is to suppress it absolutely, as though time were reversed'. The Freud encyclopaedia highlighted how 'Acts of expiation can be seen as forms of undoing'; George Eman Vaillant placed undoing among the neurotic defences in his hierarchy of defense mechanisms.

Melanie Klein in her early work had written of undoing in terms of a kind of magical reparation: 'a tendency to undo harm and put objects to right magically'. Later, however, she would use it in terms of a kind of ego disintegration - 'a process of undoing, or what she called "a falling into bits"' - and it was in this latter, rather different sense of the term that later Kleinians would tend to use it: 'an invitation to dissolution and undoing...leaving the mental field open for enactment and horror'.