Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (VII)
Running Commentary (Continued)
In this entry we will conclude our exegesis of the compact paragraph we’ve been contemplating. The paragraph’s final sentence runs:
“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.”
These lines summarize the results of Freud’s reflections. They also, of course, provide a definition of that “reality principle” which now begins to circumscribe, and to some extent supplant, the operation of the pleasure principle. The introduction of this new principle demands that “what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable.”
While the two components we distinguished in the last entry, theoretical and practical, are both still at issue, the definition provided here explicitly contains only the theoretical side. It has to do with “mental functioning” and the sorts of contents that are admissibly or imperatively “presented in the mind,” namely, those contents that — pleasurable or not — correspond to a wish-independent reality.
Yet as I’ve indicated, the motivational pressures that occasion this new principle are emphatically practical: one resolves to know reality “as it is” as a prerequisite for acting upon it — action that is itself demanded by the unrelieved frustration which the “pleasure principle’s” hallucinatory strategy failed sufficiently to manage. And, indeed, in the following paragraphs Freud catalogues the faculties that evolved in human beings, not merely for apprehending reality in truth-apt ways, but also for modes of behavior that reap the advantages of this enhanced apprehension.
Interlude: On Truth and Untruth
At this point we may note a remarkable feature of Freud’s account. One might suppose that the “default” relation of the psyche to reality is — the occasional error notwithstanding — essentially one of veridical contact. On such a view, the psyche can, must, and does apprehend reality as it is, and this is no extraordinary achievement. On the contrary, what demands explanation are those cases in which contact with reality is lost, or warped by illusion, delusion, and so on — owing, perhaps, to the malfunctioning of our perceptual and cognitive faculties.
In fact, Freud’s essay begins as though this is fundamentally what psychoanalysis must explain: how is it that the neurotic comes to “withdraw” from reality, normal access to which non-neurotics possess as a matter of course? What accounts for the “suspension” of that reality-orientation we ordinarily take for granted?
Yet several paragraphs into “Formulations,” it appears that Freud’s fundamental question is actually much the opposite: given the default, prehistoric, and relatively effective functioning of the psyche according to the pleasure principle, why should it ever establish a veridical relation to reality? It is not the distorted or illusory “conception of the real circumstances in the external world” that begs for explanation. For a psyche strictly governed by the pleasure principle, there is every reason to prefer a pleasurable false idea to a painful true one. Instead, Freud has been eager to show why the psyche would ever be induced to form conceptions of reality that do not necessarily yield pleasure but, in fact seem (initially) to diminish pleasure — and simply because these conceptions are true.
Later in the essay, Freud will soften the starkness of the proposed opposition between these principles. He will allow that the reality principle is less the “repudiation” of the pleasure principle than its prolongation, or its achievement by other means. For the moment, though, we are led to conceive two, qualitatively different, and mutually exclusive modes of thought and behavior: the “two principles of mental functioning” [zwei prinzipien des psychischen geschehens] of the essay’s title. That is:
Either one “form[s] a conception” when and because an item, “presented to the mind,” is “agreeable” — and excludes from awareness what is “disagreeable — since such a conception directly reduces the mental tension occasioned by inner excitations, needs, “drives”;
Or one admits into awareness “conceptions” of ‘what is the case,’ as it were, notwithstanding such properties as “agreeable” and “disagreeable” — that is, notwithstanding the direct impact of those conceptions on one’s levels of frustration.
Looking ahead, we might say that the pleasure principle surpasses itself “immanently.” It is abandoned, not because it fails to meet some standard of rationality or realism that the archaic psyche would have no earthly motivation for recognizing. On the contrary: the psyche abandons the pleasure principle precisely when and because it fails to deliver the “pleasure” it had promised — when, in other words, the pleasure principle becomes a raw deal according to its own, internal standard of success.