Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (XII)
Freud has argued that the reality principle supervenes when the psyche’s “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” — the pleasure principle’s modus operandi — fails to redeem its promise: to secure pleasure and relieve frustration. When this threshold is reached, the “pleasure-ego’s” instinctive behaviors — probing, shifting, reacting, expanding and contracting, in direct response to the pleasure and unpleasure of inner and outer stimuli — must be subordinated to the behavioral repertoire now being evolved. This repertoire embraces “a succession of adaptations…in the psychical apparatus” (219-220) that respond to the pressures of reality-imperatives.
These adaptations include such capacities as a (heightened) awareness of sensations, deliberate attention to the environment, thought, foresight, retention, and delayed gratification — much of which can perhaps be gathered under the rubric of “executive functioning.”
[The structural model would surely simplify things here. According to Freud’s subsequent schema, the “ego” is essentially that agency representing reality-claims and enabling adaptation to them. In that case, though, a phrase in the essay like “pleasure-ego” seems to become oxymoronic. Hasn’t the psyche qua “ego” subordinated itself to the reality principle? Or again: hasn’t this psyche disentangled itself from the pleasure principle. By contrast, inasmuch as the psyche remains in thrall to the (undiluted) pleasure principle, it is something other than the ego — quintessentially the id. Perhaps this exaggerates things, however. The ego’s “defensive” functions, which basically operate outside of awareness, arguably themselves respond to the pleasure principle; for they too protect the psyche from painful mental contents at the cost of (relative) self-occlusion.]
In any event, Freud describes each of these newfound capacities, consecutively, as adjuncts acquired by the psyche to support its reality program. The promise of these capacities, which together constitute “reality-testing” [Realitätsprüfung], is precisely that they allow the psyche to reach that aim — pleasure, satisfaction, relief — which adherence to the pleasure principle itself failed to reliably deliver.
Now one vital precondition of reality-testing, Freud suggests, is memory, and in what follows I would like to discuss it in detail, since some of its significance is obscure, I think. In the essay, “memory” [Gedächtnis], or at least the component of it designated “notation” [Merken], is intimately connected with faculties of environment-monitoring or “attention” [Aufmerksamkeit]:
“A special function was instituted which had periodically to search the external world, in order that its data might be familiar already if an urgent internal need should arise — the function of attention [Aufmerksamkeit]. Its activity meets the sense-impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance. At the same time, probably, a system of notation [Merken] was introduced, whose task it was to lay down the results of this periodical activity of consciousness — a part of what we call memory [Gedächtnis]” (220-221)
[The seeming pun of “Merken” on “Aufmerksamkeit” is lost in Strachey’s “attention” and “notation.” The association is preserved, however — deliberately or not — in Frankland’s choice of “attention” and “retention” for the two.]
We may distinguish several ingredients in what is essentially a “functional” account:
As before, the “urgent internal need[s]” which may at any time overwhelm the psyche are the foundation of Freud’s account. The pleasure-ego’s “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” was finally inadequate to these “needs.” And the mounting frustration occasioned by their non-satisfaction is what compels a reckoning with reality.
In particular: once the psyche resolves to satisfy its needs, not via hallucinatory omnipotence, but via “a real alteration” in “the real circumstances in the external world” (219), then some kind of “attention” to those circumstance — yielding useful “data” about it — logically follows. After all, the various sources of satisfaction and frustration in the psyche’s environment are of no advantage so long as this psyche possess no “data” concerning their existence, properties, and so on.
Moreover, this attention is proactive; it “periodically…search[es] the external world” and “meets the sense-impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance.” In other words, the “attending” psyche is no longer passively constrained to whichever sensations “happen” upon it, but is now empowered to orient itself.
Yet surely the data accumulated via this proactive attention is itself of no use to a psyche which cannot store and access it, as required. A data-yielding attention that totally lacked retention — were such a thing even conceivable — would lose its data the very moment it is won. Accordingly, if an “urgent internal need” were to arise, such a retention-less psyche would be no better positioned to exploit its environment for satisfaction than a psyche which lacked “attention” altogether.
I will comment more on this passage in the next entry.
Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (XI)
Summary
The last two entries contained a philosophical “interlude” inspired by some of Freud’s bolder suggestions in “Formulations.” In a moment I’ll return to my commentary on the text itself. But first, to summarize the main ideas of Freud’s essay thus far: neurosis involves a failure adequately to reckon with “reality,” “turning away” from it; any relation to reality per se — healthy or impaired — emerges relatively late in the psyche’s development (both phylogenetically and ontogenetically); hence the emergence of reality-testing [Realitätsprüfung] (222) is preceded by a epoch during which no such faculty exists.
During this first, archaic phase, the psyche operates with more primitive faculties, corresponding to a more primitive principle, namely, the pleasure principle. More specifically, as Freud later puts things, “the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for a yield of pleasure, and avoid unpleasure” (223). In fact, from the standpoint of this “pleasure-ego” — prolonged in the species and the individual in the artifact of the unconscious — it is virtually impossible to distinguish its “wish” from anything else, since the psyche itself (as yet) honors no such distinctions. This, we saw, is the essentially “omnipotent” kernel of primary process thinking, as it is still discernible in the adult unconscious:
“The strangest characteristic of unconscious (repressed) processes, to which no investigator can become accustomed without the exercise of great self-discipline, is due to their entire disregard of reality-testing; they equate reality of thought with external actuality, and wishes with their fulfillment — with the event — just as happens automatically under the dominance of the ancient pleasure principle.” (225)
That is to say, in its perfectly purified form, a psyche of the sort described has no need, hence no ability, to make those discriminations — between subject and object, or desire and fact — that eventually underly the idea of “reality.” (In the mature piece, “Negation” (1925), Freud treats the emergence of such conceptual dichotomies in a slightly different way.)
Yet according to Freud’s description of the psyche’s “momentous step,” the pressures of frustration eventually curb the pleasure principle’s unrestricted reign and compel the adoption of the “reality principle” and “secondary process” thinking (albeit always only to varying degrees). How exactly does this occur?
Initially, we found, the pleasure-ego’s hallucinatory omnipotence does yield a limited satisfaction or tension-reduction. Indeed, Freud believes that precisely this sort of satisfaction, offered by dreams, is still a precondition of the adult’s sleep. (“Dreams are the guardians of sleep.”) Yet the psyche must finally recognize “reality,” however unpleasant the experience, when its efforts to wish reality away — to hallucinate its satisfaction — no longer “work.” The old strategy yields diminishing returns, as it were. Our running commentary concluded with a passage that compresses this transition into a few lines, which should by now seem clearer:
“[Initially], whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens to-day with our dream-thoughts every night. It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavor to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step (219)
We will now return to our commentary.
Commentary
The failure of hallucination to bridge the “gap” separating a desire from its satisfaction — the experience of a literal “disillusionment” [Enttäuschung] — compels the psyche into a more objective reckoning with its environment: “In the first place, the new demands made a succession of adaptations necessary in the psychical apparatus” (219-220).
The drive for pleasure alone can no longer be trusted to directly regulate action — though “action” is perhaps anachronistic as a descriptor of the pleasure-ego’s “instinctive” movements. Nor again does “repression” suffice, “psychical activity [that] draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure” (219), a mechanism that, in Freud’s more technical language, “excluded from cathexis as productive of unpleasure some of the emerging ideas” (221). After a point, again, this capacity simply to exclude displeasing ideas also fails its own aim.
In fact, Freud’s descriptions here create the impression that the psyche originally had very few options available to it. Evidently, this pleasure-ego can only
“expand” towards pleasure,
“withdraw” from unpleasure, and
where physical withdrawal is precluded — that is, vis-à-vis the drives’ inner excitations — it can only “exclude ideas” of the offending sensation.
This last faculty, of course, essentially constitutes the “hallucinatory” strategy of tension-reduction.
Freud continues that the insufficiency of these few capacities for realizing pleasure-aims now necessitates others. These are, indeed, the characteristically “human” capacities, all of which combine to serve the reality principle that now descends upon psychic life. This suite of capacities includes:
finer “sense-organs” that register the “external world” (220);
a more powerful “consciousness” that is “attached” to these sense-organs (220);
a mobile “attention” that continually takes stock of the environment, providing useful “data” in the event of an “urgent inner need”(220);
“notation,” conceived as one sub-type of the broader genus “memory” (220);
an “impartial passing of judgment,” which displaces the more primitive action of “repression” (221)
deliberate, reality-modifying “action” in the strict sense, something surpassing in refinement the mere “motor discharge” evinced by the pleasure-ego (221); and
a “process of thinking” that itself introduces “restraint upon motor discharge,” or which allows “the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus while the process of discharge is postponed” (221). Such thinking essentially amounts to foresight, “an experimental kind of acting.” (In Frankland’s less cumbersome translation: “a trial run of an action” (5).)
This last development is arguably the cardinal achievement in restricting the reign of the pleasure principle — supported, to be sure, by each of the other capacities. For proper “thinking,” “essentially a trial run of an action,” is ultimately what decouples the “impulse” from its “discharge.” In a psyche entirely bound by the pleasure principle, by contrast, there is a fundamental identity between the two: to have an impulse for expansion or withdrawal is to submit to that impulse, to express it through the shortest possible route. The thought process introduces distance, a pause. The psyche now “tolerate[s] an increased tension of stimulus while the process of discharge is postponed.”
I’ll continue to develop these ideas in the next entry.
Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (X)
Philosophical Interlude: Reason and Impulse (II)
In the last entry we considered a passage in which Freud appears to summarize the implications for morality, and culture more generally, of the “momentous step” outlined in “Formulations.” Here Freud makes a point that verges on the philosophical:
“Just as the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for a yield of pleasure, and avoid unpleasure, so the reality-ego need do nothing but strive for what is useful and guard itself against damage. Actually the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time” (223)
What does is mean for human life that categories of “pleasure” and “unpleasure” give way increasingly, though never entirely, to those of “use” and “damage?” For surely these polarities are not merely third-personal descriptions of psychic functioning, or inner “forces” we’ve postulated to explain our observations. They are also deeply-felt moral criteria around which we may regulate — or fail or regulate — our behavior.
Both polarities have had philosophical advocates, though on the conventional view, a principal mark of moral development is precisely the capacity and inclination to subdue unruly “impulses” on behalf of some more durable and grounded ideal. In Aristotle’s ancient codification, a flourishing soul has habituated its “appetitive” parts into conformity with its rational designs; in Harry Frankfurt’s language, first-order desires are made to harmonize substantially with the second-order kind. Ideally, and broadly speaking, I have and enact only those inclinations I desire to have and enact.
Of course, this is a historically popular candidate for the unique differentia of human beings, in contrast to other entities, such as non-human animals. We are more than instinctive creatures. That is, we are not merely servile to whichever fleeting, capricious, and unbidden impulses we happen to experience. Beyond this — and provided such things as maturation, effort, and a good will — we are also capable of acting on the basis of reasons that do not immediately answer to our impulses. Indeed, these are reasons that regulate and occasionally thwart our impulses.
I noted last time that, in the early modern period, David Hume seemed to problematize this entire conception, arguing that “reason” — where such a thing exists — is not an autonomous ruler of our desires, but their natural prolongation. To repeat his mot: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
But this Humean skepticism is precisely the philosophical space in which to situate Freud’s remarks, quoted above. The idea that the reality principle is nothing but the pleasure principle by other means renders futile — even unintelligible — any project to finally “overcome” the former. For any such project could only ever facilitate the pleasure principle in more or less disguised form. For just this reason, Freud now describes both religion and science (of which psychoanalysis, of course, is one sector) as follows:
“The doctrine of reward in the after-life for the — voluntary or enforced — renunciation of earthly pleasures is nothing other than a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. Following consistently along these lines, religions have been able to effect absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future existence; but they have not by this means achieved a conquest of the pleasure principle. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in that conquest; science too, however, offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain in the end” (223-224).
In fact there are values that belong to each stage of the development he has charted. Not only does each principle bring with it functions suited to its “aims”; these aims have dimensions that strike both us and the psyche itself as moral, as more or less “ideal,” and which thus figure in Freud’s descriptions of religion and science, and subsequently education and art.
This clarifies the relation of these principles to seemingly remote developments in culture. But it is also emblematic of a central knot in philosophical treatments of psychoanalysis — or perhaps in the philosophical infrastructure of psychoanalysis itself. What, after all, is the connection between
psychoanalytic “principles,” which put on airs of governing human thought and behavior in the inexorable way that gravitational laws govern bodies in space; and
such items as norms, values, ideals, and finally the ethical systems that gather them up into a coherent view of life?
Unsurprisingly, the drift of the quoted passages is “reductive.” We may conceive this transition as lifting the psyche from a “hedonic” to a more “utilitarian” outlook — from “pleasure” to “use.” But this, it seems, is merely the ideological appearance these natural-scientific principles have for the psyche subjected to first one, then the other. They are ex post facto mythical and religious rationalizations of the transformation, hardly autonomous explanations. These changes neither abrogate Freud’s principles nor substantiate the primacy of ideal over real, value over fact — as philosophers may naively imagine — but are simply the prolongation of these principles, albeit with all the additional sophistication that culture affords. In this way, however, the account in “Formulations” illustrates one area in which Freud’s “enlightenment” program appears to devour itself.
Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (IX)
Philosophical Interlude: Reason and Impulse (I)
We have already suggested that the reality principle has both theoretical and practical sides. Freud now emphasizes that a psyche far enough along this developmental path both thinks objectively (before which mere “ideation” ruled) and acts pragmatically, registering qualities of “use” and “damage” in objects — qualities which needn’t coincide with qualities of present-moment “agreeableness.” So he writes, later in the essay:
“Just as the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for a yield of pleasure, and avoid unpleasure, so the reality-ego need do nothing but strive for what is useful and guard itself against damage” (223)
The apprehension of these qualities in the object — “use” and “damage” — encourage and discourage types of behavior unknown to the “pleasure-ego.”The latter is not yet aware that its instinctive pursuit of pleasure — entirely unmediated by memory, foresight, calculation — risks eventual pain; just as its instinctive aversion to discomfort may, in the long run, jeopardize opportunities for pleasure.
Of course, psychoanalysis is hardly unique in contrasting the one mode of action with the other, nor in teaching that the former develops into the latter as a matter of course, at least under optimal conditions — both in the history of the species and in the life of the individual. On the contrary, this is a through-line of Western thought.
Nor again is Freud the first to challenge this distinction, even while drawing it, with his caveat that, for all the difference it makes to the psyche’s operations, the pleasure principle is not displaced, as though by a separate principle originating from some other source (as Kant might say), but is protected by the reality principle. In Freud’s words:
“Actually the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time” (223)
In other words, the “new” principle merely assists the psyche in (more judiciously) obtaining its original tension-relieving aims, which were never actually renounced.
Now one trend in philosophy, from Plato to Kant, insists on the supreme autonomy of reason vis-à-vis inclination — without which, morally speaking, all is lost. Yet a countervailing voice has intermittently questioned both the theoretical feasibility of this dichotomy and the practical value of the changes to life it brings. In propounding his ideas, it seems to me that Freud joins philosophical skeptics like David Hume, who likewise argues that “reason” — where such a thing exists — is not an autonomous ruler of our desires, but something like their natural prolongation. Hume’s infamous maxim from A Treatise of Human Nature, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them,” sounds like genteel forerunner of the vision in “Formulations.” Hobbes and Schopenhauer, too, had long since deflated “reason” into something like prudential “calculation.”
Moreover, we can also acknowledge both that our dualism is strictly speaking illusory, and also that this “illusory” dualism has made an incalculable difference to human life. The sophistication of the psychic “means” to reaching one’s pleasure-indexed “aim” is refined almost beyond recognition — just as the culture’s inorganic means, its technologies, are enlarged over generations — even while the character of those aims does not in any qualitative way change.
Yet the real innovation of Freud’s account, I think, consists in identifying a mental realm — the dynamic unconscious, specifically that sector of it which can be called “repressed” — that, notwithstanding eons of development in the species, or the maturity reached by the healthy adult — persists essentially untouched by these developments, unaffected by the reality principle, but in all its functions is timelessly ruled by the pleasure principle.
This is quite different than the conventional picture familiar from, say, Augustine, who conceives fallen life on earth as a struggle between virtue and sin, reason and ineradicable impulse, whose outcome — short of grace — can only be suffering, failure, and loss. Freud is not merely teaching the perennial wisdom that sensuous desire, the demand for pleasure, is ultimately ineradicable in this life — a lesson that few people sincerely doubt. Beyond this, Freud is claiming that, unbeknownst to ourselves, at the very deepest layers, there is an agency unaware of any struggle at all. This agency sees no reason not to maintain all its claims to undiminished pleasure; has no knowledge of the compromises struck by the “higher” agencies with reality; no sense that its instinctual life of risk has been exchanged for a rational life of predictable security.
Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (VIII)
A Summary
As we have seen, Freud conjectures that the “unconscious mental processes” (219) isolated by psychoanalysis are “the older, primary processes” (219) — enduring “residues” (219) or “remnants” (219) of a pre-history during which they ruled (relatively) uncontested. Then as now, primary process functions according to the pleasure principle, artlessly striving after pleasure and withdrawing from unpleasure.
The proximate cause of the “momentous step” which interests Freud — from the pleasure principle to a more encompassing “reality principle” that somehow preserves and qualifies the former — is an inner excitation that (ultimately) strains the pleasure principle: “the state of equilibrium in the psyche was originally disrupted by the urgent demand of inner needs” (219; 3 in Frankland’s translation]).
The stock response of the psyche to these needs, when governed by primary process, is an “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” (219). That is: “whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night” (219). And initially — for eons, perhaps — this strategy worked: it provided the psyche enough satisfaction that it had no need for any other, more “reality responsive” strategy.
Yet when some variable threshold is crossed, Freud claims, the limited and temporary satisfaction afforded by “merely” hallucinating the desired object no longer suffices. Freud calls this threshold of frustration in the life of the individual and the species a “disillusionment” [Enttäuschung] (219) — arguably the template to which all subsequent disillusionments conform. (After all: “disillusioning” experiences are surely those in which a wish-laden picture of “reality” can no longer withstand the latter’s incursions.)
Hence the psyche requires a new strategy, now that the limitations of frustration-alleviating “hallucination” have been felt:
“Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavor to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step” (219)
This, in any case, is how Freud puts things in the body of the essay — bold, universal, unequivocal.
Caveat: The Pleasure Principle and the State of Nature
But we may want to avoid taking Freud’s words here too literally. It is difficult to make sense of an archaic situation such as the one described here, completely dominated by the pleasure principle and primary process. This psyche would lack any conception of wish-independent reality, since such a conception is putatively unnecessary for meeting the entirety of its aims.
Not altogether surprisingly, then, Freud introduces a footnote that virtually retracts the literal force of his claim, instead acknowledging its value as a “just so” heuristic. That is, he accepts that this archaic situation could never have occurred in a completely undiluted form:
“It will rightly be objected that an organization which was a slave to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could not have come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction like this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant — provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother — does almost realize a psychical system of this kind. It probably hallucinates the fulfillment of its internal needs; it betrays its unpleasure, when there is an increase of stimulus and an absence of satisfaction, by the motor discharge of screaming and beating about with its arms and legs, and it then experiences the satisfaction it has hallucinated. Later, as an older child, it learns to employ these manifestations of discharge intentionally as methods of expressing its feelings” (220)
I will have more to say about this caveat in later entries. For the moment, I’ll simply observe that Freud appears to signal that the essay’s heuristic of “a fiction like this” — a “Just-So Story” (69) or “scientific myth” (86), as he names it in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego — belongs in the company of others from philosophical anthropology, social theory, and the history of speculative reflection on culture. One trope seems particularly relevant here: the “state of nature” endowed by social contractarians with such colossal theoretical significance. My intuition is that, for Freud, the psyche’s transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle parallels a community’s emergence from a state of nature into a political (or proto-political) order of some kind. (Of course, in texts like Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, Freud postulates his own psychoanalytic variant of this myth stricto sensu.)
Likewise, the ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding the state of nature in early modern philosophy are echoed in Freud’s descriptions of intrapsychic development. A condition governed by the pleasure-principle is blind, anarchical, edenic, inhuman, savage. But the progress won by the psyche in assimilating the reality principle — in evolving the competencies demanded by it — is similarly equivocal, or seems to involve commensurable gains and losses.
A moment later, Freud will suggest that these losses are subsequently memorialized by religion. But not only is religion powerless to transcend this tragedy; even science cannot totally “conquer” the pleasure-principle. I will return to these thoughts in another entry.