Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (III)

Running Commentary

I concluded the last entry with a remarkable paragraph from “Formulations.” Here, in bold, synoptic strokes, Freud describes and explains the transition in mental functioning — the “momentous step” — from the “pleasure principle” to the “reality principle.” Here again is the paragraph:

“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)

Let us consider each of the sweeping sentences in this paragraph, beginning with the first. For the sake of readability, I have emboldened Freud’s words:

“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.”

Uncertain that I’d grasped Freud’s meaning correctly in this line and the ones that follow (from James Strachey’s Standard Edition), I consulted both the original German text and the more recent translation by Graham Frankland, published by Penguin in 2001. First, the German:

“Ich greife auf Gedankengänge zurück, die ich an anderer Stelle (im allgemeinen Abschnitt der Traumdeutung) entwickelt habe, wenn ich supponiere, daß der psychische Ruhezustand anfanglich durch die gebieterischen Forderungen der inneren Bedürfnisse gestört wurde.” (231)

And now, Frankland's alternative translation of the same sentence:

“I am relying on trains of thought developed elsewhere (in the general section of the Interpretation of Dreams) when I postulate that the state of equilibrium in the psyche was originally disrupted by the urgent demands of inner needs” (4)

Several differences stand out. Some do not seem to affect our understanding much — for instance, that Freud had interpolated a reference to the Traumdeutung within the sentence itself. (Strachey relegates the reference to a footnote without acknowledging his decision.)

A more interesting difference, which might indeed incline us to another understanding of Freud’s meaning in this sentence, is found in the replacement of Strachey’s “the state of psychic rest” with Frankland’s “the state of equilibrium in the psyche.” The source of this divergence is, in Freud’s German, the phrase “psychische Ruhezustand.”

Now, while Strachey’s “rest” would certainly be an appropriate English term for “Ruhe” (in Ruhezustand) in most contexts, in the present case it seems to verge on the concept of sleep in the strict sense. (This is perhaps encouraged by the proximate reference to the theory of dreams.) Yet Freud plainly has something more general in mind than “rest” in the narrow sense of something cyclically contrasted with “exertion.” After all: what meaning could “rest” have as an original characteristic of prehistoric organic substance, before its transition to that “activity” from which it might need rest? Rest from what, exactly? This is one reason, I think, to prefer Frankland’s “state of equilibrium,” which we might envision — at least logically — antedating some subsequent state of disequilibrium.   

But “equilibrium” also has a second, related advantage: it puts us unambiguously in mind of Freud’s “constancy principle,” to which the essay implicitly, continuously alludes. I have discussed this principle at some length in other places, as a rule in connection with Freud’s evolving concept of a drive.

We may recall that, in the later “Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), Freud is willing for the first time to decouple the (formerly conflated) “constancy” and “pleasure” principles. (He recognizes that, in some cases, an increase of tension may be pleasurable, while a diminishment of tension may be un-pleasurable.) At the time of “Formulations,” however, these principles appear equivalent. Some degree of tension — a product, further, of inner stimuli — is essentially Freud’s “third personal” descriptor for the “first personal” experience of pleasure, and vice versa.

While not yet articulated in the systematic language of drive theory — only really codified in “Drives and Their Fates” (1915) — such notions, and their implicit assumptions, seem to peer through in a sentence like the one we are now examining. For in Freud’s description of a “psychische Ruhezustand” that is “originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs,” we are plainly invited to envision a psychic state that is both quiescent, without tension, and also pleasurable (or at least not un-pleasurable). Indeed, only something like “the peremptory demands of internal needs” could credibly introduce such “tension,” wrench the psyche out of its quiescent state, and henceforth, finally, motivate some strategy to restore the lost equilibrium. The quintessential example of such a strategy, as Freud shortly tells us, is the primitive operation of “hallucinatory fulfillment.”

(At this stage of his thinking, Freud does not seem to contemplate the possibility that an original state of equilibrium — absence of tension — might itself be felt as un-pleasurable, might itself demand some activity that heightens this tension. Such a conjecture would presumably point forward to the later concept of Eros, the life-drive, dedicated to establishing ever-larger “unities.”

In the next entry I will continue my running commentary on our paragraph, beginning with Freud’s implicit picture of a “drive.”