The enemy is produced by substitution, not by the father’s mere danger

Evidence

Yet the father does not-he cannot-remain an enemy for long. Indeed, it is equally the case that, in the beginning and from the beginning, there was substitution. And it is this substitution that not only constitutes neurosis, but that also produces the enemy object, the enemy as substitutive object. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 438 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The enemy is derivative and potential rather than primary and natural; The enemy object is produced by a primal substitution — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 438; Emotional ambivalence rooted in the father makes him the first enemy object (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The enemy object is produced by a primal substitution #expands (0.94) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 438
• Enemy objects arise when ambivalent conflict is displaced onto a substitute #expands (0.92) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 442