Difference and Disavowal : Stanford University Press : 9780804738286 : 0804738289 : 01 Jan 2002 : Difference and Disavowal is a major rethinking of a central tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis?the repression theory. It centers on fundamental issues in practice and theory, beginning with a central conundrum for clinical psychoanalysis: how to understand apparently analyzable patients who resist the essential therapeutic measure of analysis?interpretation. The author finds the answer in a revision and expansion of Freud's theory of fetishism. Freud introduced the defense mechanism of disavowal in order to understand what he called the registration and repudiation of reality in fetishism. However, his understanding of the reality disavowed in fetishism is self-contradictory. The contradiction in Freud's argument can be resolved by understanding disavowal in terms of registration and repudiation of difference. The patients who resist interpretation register and repudiate the differentiating