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

Running Commentary (Continued)

On the basis of our previous discussions, we gather that Freud is proposing something like the following. Historically and logically, “untruth” is prior to “truth.” Both at its origins and persistently at the deepest layers of mind, “thinking” is not a faculty of truth, but something like a tension-relieving device. Hence it is essentially — in a profoundly paradoxical way — a faculty of self-deception. To be sure, the phrase “self-deception” is perhaps anachronistic as a description of these kinds of processes; it presupposes some “contact” with truth or reality, with respect to which one might be deceived. But a psyche as totally dominated by the pleasure principle as the one Freud imagines in this essay would presumably lack all of the mental and physiological equipment underlying access to reality in the first place.

[Such equipment, which evolves and functions increasingly according to the “reality principle,” is catalogued in the next paragraphs. One may however wish to know how Freud’s account here comports with basic principles of evolution and adaption from natural selection. He must surely believe that, during those eons in which the pleasure principle reigned uncontested, or nearly so, this was not an obstacle to the members of a species surviving to the age of reproduction — that, indeed, thinking that behaves according to this principle effectively promoted that survival, somehow or other.]

The paragraph continues: “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.” Arguably, Freud ought to have included another sentence or clause between the previous sentence and this one. For without saying so explicitly, he has until now strongly indicated that, to some appreciable degree, the initial strategy of hallucinatory omnipotence works. In other words, before intolerable levels of frustration force its “abandonment” — and no sooner — the psyche’s “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” enjoyed some (equivocal) success. As Freud described their operation in the previous paragraphs,

“the older, primary processes…strive towards gaining pleasure; psychical activity draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure…Our dreams at night and our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from distressing impressions are remnants of the dominance of this principle and proofs of its power.” (219).

The hallucinations found in dreams and psychosis, liabilities notwithstanding, are surely one effective way to “draw back” or “tear ourselves away from” certain “events” and “distressing impressions.” One fantasizes the presence of something pleasurable, or the absence of something unpleasurable, and this does — albeit temporarily and partially — provide the tension-relief that is sought.

A central plank of Freud’s Traumdeutung is that dreams, as “guardians of sleep,” really do provide some amount of drive gratification, keeping internal excitations to a tolerable enough level to permit the reality-withdrawal that sleep essentially is. Freud himself includes this reminder in a footnote to the last sentence: “The state of sleep is able to re-establish the likeness of mental life as it was before the recognition of reality, because a prerequisite of sleep is a deliberate rejection of reality (the wish to sleep)” (219). Some robust “recognition of reality” encloses sleep on either side. But in sleep itself, such a recognition must be suspended. And this means that the level of frustration which would compel such a recognition must not be reached, must be managed and reduced by the dream activity.

Yet at some point — precisely the hypothetical threshold Freud identifies in this essay — the psyche which behaves in this way suffers “the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction.” Strachey renders the episode a “disappointment,” but Frankland’s “disillusionment” is surely both more accurate and more evocative a translation of Freud’s “Enttäuschung.” The term seems to carry a great semantic weight. The experience is a disappointment, certainly. But more than this, it is dis-illusioning: it demonstrates to the psyche that its entire mode of functioning, its putative contact with reality, the “picture” it has tendentiously formed of its object, are all illusory — hence that the pleasure or relief it affords, too, is somehow illusory.

To summarize: Freud postulates that at some stage in its development, the pleasure-governed psyche — whether the individual or the species, or organic substance generally — undergoes frustration, “the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction,” thus a proper “disillusionment,” with all the resonances of that term. The suckling infant’s imagination of the breast does not adequately relieve its hunger. Nor, perhaps, does the sleeper’s dream, or the tribesperson’s omnipotent, animistic ritual, effectively realize the drive-based “aims” that initially motivate them: quenching thirst, say, or libidinal gratification, or murderous wishes. So the “attempt at satisfaction” must be exchanged for another, more effective strategy.

I will take up this “alternative” in the next entry.