Enemy objects arise when ambivalent conflict is displaced onto a substitute

Evidence

Such are precisely the terms in which Freud explains Little Hans’s neurosis. Substitution, then, made Little Hans’s “emotional reaction” into a neurosis. “What made it a neurosis was one thing alone: the replacement of his father by a horse” (103/G248). This replacement is also a “displacement,” a kind of substitution that, strictly speaking does not substitute for anything. (Since substitution is here “the only thing” and considered independently from the “actual” figure of the father, a father that cannot be, therefore, the origin of the pathology.) It is a mechanism, the mechanism, whereby, once again, a “conflict due to ambivalence” can be if not resolved, then avoided, and the avoidance is what maintains the substitutive chain of enemy objects in motion from the beginning. The conflict, then, “is not dealt with in relation to one and the same person,” is not dealt with, that is, in direct relation to the father. Rather, Freud continues, the conflict “is circumvented, as it were, by one of the pairs of conflicting impulses being directed to another person as a substitutive object” (103/G248). Freud then goes on to describe this object as a “father-substitute” (104/G248), one that, we just saw, was so from the very beginning. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 442

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the substitutive mechanism whereby a conflict due to ambivalence is turned into an enemy object - core conceptual vocabulary for the book’s genealogy.
• XREF: Connects to the displacement-of-conflict account of out-group enmity and to the psychoanalytic strand of the antisemitism-islamophobia bridge arguments elsewhere in this batch.