negation

(nĭ-gā'shən)
n.

1. The act or process of negating.
2. A denial, contradiction, or negative statement.
3. The opposite or absence of something regarded as actual, positive, or affirmative.

negational ne·ga'tion·al adj.

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noun

1. An often formal act of putting an end to: abolishment, abolition, abrogation, annihilation, annulment, cancellation, defeasance, invalidation, nullification, voidance. Law avoidance, extinguishment. See continue/stop/pause.
2. A refusal to grant the truth of a statement or charge: contradiction, denial, disaffirmance, disaffirmation, disclaimer, rejection. Law traversal. See affirm/deny/argue.

n

Definition: contradiction, denial
Antonyms: affirmation, allowance, approval, confirmation, permission, substantiation

The negation of a proposition is its denial: classically, that proposition which is true when it is false, and false when it is true. The sign ¬ (for alternatives see Logical symbols) expresses a truth function, defined in the table:

p	¬p
T	F
F	T

A proposition may be controverted in other ways than by asserting its strict negation. For instance ‘that's red’, is controverted by ‘that's green’, since both cannot be true together. But both can be false and one is not the direct denial of the other. See contrary, square of opposition.

The term negation (Verneinung) denotes a mental process in which the subject formulates the content of an unconscious wish in a negative form. The content of the wish finds expression in consciousness, yet the subject continues to disown it.

This concept first appeared in Freud's work in connection with the analysis of the "Rat Man" when the patient produced an association having to do with the death of his father but immediately "rejects the idea with energy" (1909d, p. 178). Yet Freud's main discussion of the topic appears in "Negation" (1925h), where he sets forth a theory of negation that is close to being a theory of forms of language or a theory of judgment.

Freud posits two distinct processes of negation: one involves the rejection of a thought, the other the acknowledgment of a disappointed expectation. The first kind of negation, involving rejection, is the kind encountered in the "Rat Man" case. Another example is when a patient refuses to believe that the woman he has just dreamed about is his mother: "You're going to think it was my mother," he will say to the analyst, "but it wasn't my mother." This negation may be interpreted to mean, "I reject the idea that this person could be my mother because I dislike that idea." Negation is a rejection of an unpleasant idea by means of the pleasure principle alone. The process of projection is already at work in the utterance "You're going to think it was my mother," for in this way the patient projects into the mind of the analyst a thought that is in fact the patient's.

Negation as a defense mechanism is more supple than repression in that it preserves the thought content that repression would render unconscious. The defensive aspect of the mechanism is confined to the distancing achieved by means of the negation, which allows the patient to avoid shouldering the disagreeable implications of a thought that has successfully formed.

In addition to this first kind of negation, Freud describes a second type, namely a judgment by a psyche that fails to encounter in the outside world a satisfying mental representation of what it desires. The psyche is then obliged to arrive at the negative conclusion that what it has been seeking in external reality is indeed not present. This type of negation thus amounts to an assertion of absence. In making this assertion, the psyche recognizes the independent existence of the outside world and, thus achieving effective reality-testing.

The idea of negation lies at the center of a very dense conceptual nexus within the Freudian model. Several other terms are closely linked to Verneinung(negation) and overlap with it in meaning to a greater or lesser extent. Occasionally Freud used the Latinate German term die Negation to refer to a basic trait of the "system Ucs.," in which there is "no negation" (1915e, p. 186). This enabled him to define the system of the unconscious as prior to intellectual judgment. By contrast, the Germanic word Verneinung, embracing as it does both negation as a mental process and negation as a grammatical form, presupposes a psychic agency capable of making judgments.

In Freud's usage there is a wider difference in meaning between Verneinung and Verleugnen, which is translated into English as either "denial" or (following the preference of the editors of the Standard Edition) "disavowal." In the process of disavowal, the subject refuses to embrace the psychic consequences of something perceived. Thus the "Wolf Man" (1918b [1914]) said, in effect, "I see that a woman does not have a penis, but I deny any force to this observation, and what is more, I shall continue to believe that she has a penis." In disavowal, a reality judgment produces a conclusion ("A woman does not have a penis"), but this conclusion is a dead letter having no impact on the psyche. Thus the recognition of a reality ("[I see that] a woman does not have a penis") is juxtaposed to a wish ("[I want] a woman to have a penis") without being integrated together. In both disavowal and negation, the subject avoids responsibility for a disagreeable thought. The two differ, however, in that disavowal is rejection of a disagreeable perception, whereas negation is the acceptance of a wish.

Lastly, the term foreclosure (French forclusion) was introduced by Jacques Lacan to render Freud's use of the term Verwerfung in connection with the psychotic mechanism of "expulsion of a fundamental 'signifier' " (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 166).

The theory of negation is no doubt an area where the psychoanalytic theorization of mental processes comes very close to linguistic concerns, especially to the study of utterances. From a linguistic standpoint, one might say that negation in the sense of rejection is equivalent to a polemical negation (as in, for example, "For me, this woman in my dream is not my mother"), whereas the recognition of absence—a negation that can be expressed as a reality judgment—is equivalent to a "simple" negative report, much like a statement such as "I have not had a dream for a long time."

Clear boundaries need to be drawn between negation, absence, and the idea or representation of absence. These distinctions, in broad outline, are as follows. In all cases, negation is directed at an ideational content. This content, in the context of the theory of the hallucinatory satisfaction of a wish, emerges as a consequence of the absence of the wished-for object. This absence obliges the subject to hallucinate, to represent, the missing object. Absence is thus a precondition of the emergence of the representation. In this regard, absence is distinct from negation, which is an operation affecting an ideational content. As for the representation of absence, it arises only after the capacity for judging reality has been established, when the subject is able to articulate the gap between what he wants and what he sees.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. SE, 10: 151-318.

——. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

——. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.

——. (1925h). Negation. SE, 19: 233-239.

Hyppolite, Jean. (1988). A spoken commentary on Freud's Verneinung. In The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1: Freud's papers on technique, 1953-1954 (John Forrester, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1954)

Lacan, Jacques. (1988). Introduction and reply to Jean Hyppolite's presentation of Freud's Verneinung. In The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1: Freud's papers on technique, 1953-1954 (John Forrester, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1954)

Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1973). The language of psycho-analysis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1967)

Further Reading

Litowitz, Bonnie. (1998). An expanded developmental line for negation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 46, 121-148.

Tyson, Robert L. (1994). Neurotic negativism and negation in the psychoanalytic situation. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 49, 293-314.

—LAURENT DANON-BOILEAU

(DOD) Measures to deceive, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy an adversary's space systems and services or any other space system or service used by an adversary that is hostile to US national interests. See also space control.

See words rhyming with "negation."

  See crossword solutions for the clue Negation.

Dansk (Danish)
n. - negation, modsat, negerende (filos.), nægtelse

Nederlands (Dutch)
loochening, ontkenning, weigering, negatieve uitspraak/ levenshouding

Français (French)
n. - négation, réfutation, (Ling, Philos) négation

Deutsch (German)
n. - Negation, Ablehnung, Verleugnung

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - άρνηση, αναίρεση, ανατροπή

Italiano (Italian)
negazione

Português (Portuguese)
n. - negativa (f), nulidade (f)

Русский (Russian)
отрицание

Español (Spanish)
n. - negación

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - (för)nekande, negation, frånvaro, motsats, negerande (filos.)

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
否定, 不存在, 拒绝

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 否定, 不存在, 拒絕

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 부인, 결여

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 否定, 否定的陳述, 無, 非存在, 反論

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) انكار, رفض, نفي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮שלילה, סתירה, ביטול‬

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