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

Running Commentary (Continued)

I began to argue in the last entry that, with the “peremptory demands of internal needs,” Freud is unmistakably appealing to an early, still relatively inchoate conception of a drive, one he will subsequently describe in “Drives and Their Fates” (1915) in some detail. Indeed, in that later essay, the “the peremptory demands of internal needs” reappear, with minimal change, precisely as the drives themselves:

“A drive…never operates as a force giving a momentary impact but always as a constant one. Moreover, since it impinges not from without but from within the organism, no flight can avail against it. A better term for a drive stimulus is a ‘need.’ What does away with a need is ‘satisfaction.’ This can be attained only by an appropriate (‘adequate’) alteration of the internal source of stimulation” (118-119; I’ve replaced Strachey’s “instinct” with “drive” as a better translation of Freud’s Trieb, for reasons that are well-discussed in the literature)

And again a bit later, in that same essay:

“[T]he nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition… Instinctual stimuli, which originate from within the organism…make far higher demands on the nervous system [than external stimuli] and cause it to undertake involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation…When we further find that the activity of even the most highly developed mental apparatus is subject to the pleasure principle, i.e. is automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series, we can hardly reject the further hypothesis that these feelings reflect the manner in which the process of mastering stimuli takes place — certainly in the sense that unpleasurable feelings are connected with an increase and pleasurable feelings with a decrease of stimulus” (120-121)

A drive is famously just the sort of thing that, emanating from within, puts the mind to work. It is more or less synonymous, depending upon emphasis and the “property” one has in view, with concepts including “need,” “stimulus,” or “pressure.” So, regarding the latter, Freud says:

“By the pressure [Drang] of a drive we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which it represents. The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to all drives; it is in fact their very essence” (122)

What matters, again, is that such third-personal descriptions of drives are also intimately linked to specific, first-personal — phenomenological — sensations. It seems to belong to our everyday conceptions of “pressure” and especially “need” that they are felt as un-pleasurable. Indeed, the greater the “pressure” of a particular unmet “need,” the greater is the suffering it involves. The “build-up” of a need’s “pressure” is per definition “frustrating” — just the sort of equivalence that Freud capitalizes on in his account here. And it forms the conceptual backdrop of that sentence we can now reconsider with fresh eyes:

“I shall be returning to lines of thought which I have developed elsewhere when I suggest that the state of psychical rest [or: equilibrium] was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs.”

The second sentence in our paragraph now runs:

“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.”

Once again, Freud refuses to restrict the application of these comments to any specific object. For all we know, the organism that takes up this “hallucinatory” strategy vis-à-vis the disturbance to its equilibrium is a prehistoric amoeba with its pseudopodia (one of Freud’s favored images, for example in his discussions of narcissism); the first mammal; the first human; or, of course, the infant in which these histories are supposedly sedimented. And the last part of this sentence, which alludes to the Traumdeutung’s central proposition, tells us that Freud’s “object” here also embraces the non-neurotic adult’s experience while asleep.

Indeed, Freud’s assertion that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish — albeit a wish that the adult’s internal censor has distorted beyond clear recognition — now becomes the kernel of all “primary process” mental activity. For such activity is in all events a strategic response to frustration, to the build up of psychic tension originating in drive stimuli, that nonetheless stops short of reality-testing, or thought and behavior “realistically” adapted to an objective situation. Not only in the adult’s dreams, the neurotic’s unconscious, and the infant’s first experiences, but also in the global functioning of our remotest ancestors (Totem and Taboo) — in each of these one will (allegedly) find roughly the same thing.

Confronted with frustration, for such a mentality, “whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner.” The essay as a whole is light on illustration, but we may look to well-known examples from other places in Freud’s writings. Both the infant in the nursery and the tribes-person described in Totem and Taboo “omnipotently” conflate thought-wish with its reality. Or rather, it is scarcely imaginable to either that “wish” and “reality” might not coincide. An infant who is frustrated by the heightening of tension from hunger at first imagines the breast that would satisfy that hunger and, more importantly, apprehends this imagination as a reality. Likewise, at the cultural stage of that mentality profiled in Totem and Taboo, the wish that evil befalls an enemy is perforce recognized as a fait accompli. The many features and mechanisms of primary process (associative, imagistic, contradictory, and so on) are explained for Freud as modes of realizing this omnipotence, hence of subserving the pleasure principle.