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The author emphasises the ambiguity of Freud’s concept of phylogenesis. It is mentioned in Freud’s clinical practice only in relation to the Wolf man and particularly in terms of the primal castration fantasy. Now, in the childhood memory of the cut finger and in the secondary hypochondriac delusion, words attempt to stand in for a decathexis of unconscious representations and the concept of the primal fantasy no longer has a place. The psychotic logic requires the metapsychology of the second topography and the primary defences and, more generally, the need for a theorisation that is open to new dimensions.