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.