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

Interlude: On the Significance of Frustration

There is apparently something remarkable about the place of “frustration” in Freud’s account, considered as an explanatory item. The pleasure principle purportedly gives way to the reality principle, considerations of truth, for reasons related to frustration. The paradigmatic operation of the pleasure principle, hallucination, fails to deliver sufficient pleasure — or fails to sufficiently forestall unpleasure —and so the psyche must become acquainted with reality, the way things actually are, in order really to modify the sources of unpleasure.

Frustration, in other words, rouses the organism from its “slumber” in a self-enclosed, fantastical, and essentially truth-indifferent realm where wish alone prevails, and compels it to establish contact with reality, to develop a concern for truth. In this respect, frustration bears an enlightening, progressive significance, inasmuch as it motivates the transition from illusion to truth.

Yet as we underscored in our discussion of the essay’s opening paragraph, “frustration” also explains for Freud the organism’s movement in the opposite, regressive direction. After all, this same “awareness of reality” and “concern for truth,” the turn to which is motivated by frustration, may itself become a source of considerable, even intolerable frustration and suffering. Hence the reality-withdrawal constitutive of neurosis:

“We have long observed that every neurosis has as its result, and probably therefore as its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life, an alienating of him from reality…Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable — either the whole or parts of it. The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis which seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their insanity. But in fact every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality.” (218)

Or again: according to Freud’s account, as individuals and as a species, we develop sensory, intellectual, and motor “tools” because they promise to alleviate our suffering and promote our satisfaction. But these same tools, which secure for us a clear-eyed vision of how things stand, so empowering us to act effectively in the world — these tools can undermine their pleasure-affording aims.

It is as though Freud is saying: some contact with reality, some truth, can and does enhance the organism’s satisfaction, at least in the long run; but too much reality, or unqualified reality, or the wrong sort of reality, can potentially diminish or even destroy this satisfaction. The latter may render the cost of reality-testing too dear, and incentivizes the psyche’s regression to its former life under the pleasure principle — a degree of truth-obliviousness — as a superior path (given the circumstances) to pleasure, the relief of suffering.

In sum, frustration evidently turns us toward reality and also away from it, as the case may be.

Running Commentary (Continued) — Introducing the Reality Principle

Let us return now to the paragraph we are investigating, which continues as follows:

“Instead of it [i.e. the attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination], 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”

Having reached that threshold of frustration in which “hallucination” is of no avail — or no longer — the psyche evidently innovates a strategy with two components, theoretical and practical. It is one thing, that is, to (a) construct a veridical “conception” of reality; it is another, to (b) act upon that conception, to “make a real alteration” in that (appropriately grasped) reality.

Presumably, the psyche that pursues its first, hallucinatory strategy, spontaneously forming “conceptions” solely according to its drive-based wishes, has no need for either component. Its non-veridical, or at least arbitrarily veridical conceptions themselves deliver sufficient relief of tension to obviate any calculated, realistic “action.” The aim of reforming reality demands epistemic contact with it, in order to guide that reformation. And this aim is a product, it seems, of a “surplus” frustration which hallucination cannot in a given instance manage.

Such formulations, of course, point to the “primacy of the practical.” Of the two components, that is, the aim of reforming reality is historically and logically prior. Frustration induces such an aim, and that aim, in turn, induces the psyche into “grasping” reality, no longer merely as a function of its desires, but as something independent of these desires — an item the accurate knowledge of which conditions any efficacious “action” upon it. Briefly stated: there first arises a “need” for (frustration-relieving) action; and only consequently a “need” for (action-facilitating) knowledge.

Here we may repurpose one of Freud’s own examples from the Traumdeutung. A thirsty sleeper, who has with mixed success dreamt of drinking water, will upon waking need credible knowledge of his or her real options — whether and where there is water around, and how to make one’s way over to it. Such a transition, the experience of awakening from a dream, would appear to reproduce in miniature an eons-long evolution of the psyche’s interest in, and capacity for reality-testing, “form[ing] a conception of the real circumstances in the external world.” Any appreciable need for such reality-testing would have been forestalled so long as the simpler “satisfaction by means of hallucination” was reliable and sufficient.