Too often it has been overlooked that the basic content that determines a formal quality may be an infantile one.
Can elation too be a defense, or a resistance, or a "manifest element" that needs reduction?
The idea of mania goes back to the Greeks, and the term has been used since for a variety of excitements, delusional states, and other conditions.
The elation is certainly a narcissistic neurosis like the depression. It too has its roots in oral eroticism.
...numerous neurotic situations propitious for the study of orality.
For instance, slowing or speeding up of the flow of thought is now taken for granted as a cardinal difference between depressions and elations, respectively.
melancholia, mania, paranoia -- found in Hippocrates.
Noli disturbare circulos meos.
Anal fantasies were also prominent, mainly of expelling and soiling, which, Abraham was later to remark, did not, as in obsessional neuroses, refer to the infantile period when the dominant libidinal pleasure was to retain and master the feces through sphincter action, but to an earlier anal stage when expulsion and destruction offered the greater pleasure.
By introjecting and incorporating the lost object, the patient identifies himself with it, and the taking in is conceived in the patient's fantasies as a devouring, a necrophagia.
recurrent need for structural regression (superego to ego to id) and the accompanying release of energy.
Prerequisites: oral predisposition; early injury to narcissism (before Oedipus resolved); repitition later in life (external or self-inflicted)
The associations showed that words were equated to feces, and perceiving to eating; it was as if the manic gobbled up perceptions in his overalertness to expel them immediately in his logorrhea.
...the pleasure ego, a sort of ideally conceived infantile organization, which treats the world as if it were pleasant or unpleasant to the taste and "spits out" the unacceptable.
Persons predisposed to depressions have an intense craving for narcissistic gratification.
In the drug intoxications...the elevated moods, elations or ecstasies were repetitions of the breast situation, and as he thought, consequences of an alimentary orgasm.
pharmacothymias (drug addictions)... the elation being artificially produced to supplant depressions brought about by narcissistic insults... the ultimate desideratum was again the bliss that ensues from the fantasied union with the breast at nursing, expressed in the 'Rausch' or elation.
distressed perplexity
Hemmung (inhibition; from the German ed. of Freud)
thymopsyche (affective apparatus of the mind)
In fact, her dreams were instructive in showing how denial gains oneiric representation. Things to be repudiated were protrayed as games, as theatrical or cinematic performances, as parts of a work of fiction, or as the statements of drunken, insane or mendacious persons.
... epistemophilia -- the craving to know -- is a modified expression of oral wishes.
Another common feature of the elation is the variety of content and the apparent speed of thought known as 'flight of ideas'.
In German, the adicts drugs are called 'Rauschgifte', and 'Rausch' means spree...
The Oral Triad of Wishes: the wish to devour, the wish to be devoured, the wish to fall asleep.
Fears emphasized the danger of this substitute for the original, primal-chemical, lactic somnifacient.
adult coitus pictured as an act of reciprocal cannibalism or reciprocal sucking (cf. Dali's 'Cannibalism in Autumn')