Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (II)
The “unconscious mental processes” are, Freud continues, the accustomed “starting point” of psychoanalytic psychology. He now alludes to, without specifying, the “peculiarities” of these processes. The following lines, however, will recall to students of psychoanalysis the sort of peculiarities in question: “We consider these to be the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental process” (219). Let us recall that, in Freud’s writings and psychoanalysis more generally, “primary process” designates (as against “secondary process”) a mode or style of thinking characterized by plasticity, mobility, association, contradiction, pun, image, metaphor, and so on. (Though see the clarifying discussion in Charles Brenner’s classic text, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, 45-47, where Brenner distinguishes another, albeit related use of the the distinction between primary and secondary process — this one having to do with the (objective, impersonal) “binding” and “unbinding” of libido by the psychic apparatus.)
What these “peculiarities” of primary process thinking all share — apart, perhaps, from their self-evident deficiency when measured against the canons of logically-sound secondary process — is their “purpose.” In particular, as Freud now claims:
“The governing purpose [Tendenz] obeyed by these primary processes is easy to recognize; it is described as the pleasure-unpleasure [Lust-Unlust] principle, or more shortly the pleasure principle. These processes strive towards gaining pleasure; psychical activity draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure” (219)
To repeat, such pleasure-governed processes are allegedly “residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental process.” The “phase of development” at issue is rather vaguely defined in this passage, and the remainder of the essay does little to remedy this vagueness. For example: we might imagine, I think with some justification, that Freud is referring to the first epoch of living matter, thus joining his reflections here to the speculative cosmology introduced later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and developed in Civilization and its Discontents. But we might also imagine, again justifiably, that he is referring to the very first human beings who, essentially similar to and continuous with non-human animals, had yet to evolve any of those traits and capacities that enable reality-responsiveness. Of course, Freud is referring to the state of human beings during infancy, even today, before their “ego capacities,” modes of reality-adaptation, are first activated (Heinz Hartmann). And he is referring, as well, to the persistence of primary process thinking in the adult’s unconscious mental activities. But it seems likely enough that Freud has all of these in mind, simultaneously, and sees no reason to select among them.
We might contemplate the following as an illustration of these ambiguities. In one of the essay’s first footnotes, Freud refers hypothetically — as an objection to his position — to “an organization which was a slave to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world.” The concept of “an organization” seems so abstract that it is agnostic with regard to the possible interpretations above, or capacious enough to include all of them. When, a moment later, Freud varies his language, and speaks instead of a “psychical system” — something illustrated by the infant-mother dyad, or at least the infant’s inchoate idea of that dyad — we might suppose he has restricted the object of his study to human reality, leaving behind non-human and pre-human reality. But we’d be mistaken, for he then cites the “neat example” [Ein schönes Beispiel] of such a “psychical system” which is “afforded by a bird’s egg with its food supply enclosed in its shell,” since it is “able to satisfy even its nutritional requirements autistically” and “for it, the care provided by its mother is limited to the provision of warmth” (220). Thus once again Freud expands our conception of his object to include the (relatively) rudimentary organization of living matter. (Importantly, Freud cites, not the “analogy” or “symbol” of a bird’s egg, but its “example.”)
There follows now a compact, remarkable paragraph, to the exposition of which the remainder of the essays seems dedicated. This paragraph summarizes Freud’s view of the determinants, the content, and the consequences of a “momentous step” (219), namely, from
a psychic situation in which “pleasure principle” prevails in more or less pure form; to one in which
the mind’s functioning falls increasingly — though never entirely — under the influence of the “reality principle”
Here I will reproduce the paragraph in its entirety, and in the next entries I will comment on each of its parts. Such meticulous attention will repay our efforts, I think, since — again — so much of the easy is grounded in, and illuminated by, the broad claims found in this place. The paragraph runs:
“I shall be returning to lines of thought which I have developed elsewhere when I suggest that the state of psychical rest was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs. When this happened, 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)
In the next entry I will begin a running commentary on Freud’s words.