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

A Summary

As we have seen, Freud conjectures that the “unconscious mental processes” (219) isolated by psychoanalysis are “the older, primary processes” (219) — enduring “residues” (219) or “remnants” (219) of a pre-history during which they ruled (relatively) uncontested. Then as now, primary process functions according to the pleasure principle, artlessly striving after pleasure and withdrawing from unpleasure.

The proximate cause of the “momentous step” which interests Freud — from the pleasure principle to a more encompassing “reality principle” that somehow preserves and qualifies the former — is an inner excitation that (ultimately) strains the pleasure principle: “the state of equilibrium in the psyche was originally disrupted by the urgent demand of inner needs” (219; 3 in Frankland’s translation]).

The stock response of the psyche to these needs, when governed by primary process, is an “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” (219). That is: “whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night” (219). And initially — for eons, perhaps — this strategy worked: it provided the psyche enough satisfaction that it had no need for any other, more “reality responsive” strategy.

Yet when some variable threshold is crossed, Freud claims, the limited and temporary satisfaction afforded by “merely” hallucinating the desired object no longer suffices. Freud calls this threshold of frustration in the life of the individual and the species a “disillusionment” [Enttäuschung] (219) — arguably the template to which all subsequent disillusionments conform. (After all: “disillusioning” experiences are surely those in which a wish-laden picture of “reality” can no longer withstand the latter’s incursions.)

Hence the psyche requires a new strategy, now that the limitations of frustration-alleviating “hallucination” have been felt:

“Instead of it, 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. 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” (219)

This, in any case, is how Freud puts things in the body of the essay — bold, universal, unequivocal.

Caveat: The Pleasure Principle and the State of Nature

But we may want to avoid taking Freud’s words here too literally. It is difficult to make sense of an archaic situation such as the one described here, completely dominated by the pleasure principle and primary process. This psyche would lack any conception of wish-independent reality, since such a conception is putatively unnecessary for meeting the entirety of its aims.

Not altogether surprisingly, then, Freud introduces a footnote that virtually retracts the literal force of his claim, instead acknowledging its value as a “just so” heuristic. That is, he accepts that this archaic situation could never have occurred in a completely undiluted form:

“It will rightly be objected that an organization which was a slave to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could not have come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction like this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant — provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother — does almost realize a psychical system of this kind. It probably hallucinates the fulfillment of its internal needs; it betrays its unpleasure, when there is an increase of stimulus and an absence of satisfaction, by the motor discharge of screaming and beating about with its arms and legs, and it then experiences the satisfaction it has hallucinated. Later, as an older child, it learns to employ these manifestations of discharge intentionally as methods of expressing its feelings” (220)

I will have more to say about this caveat in later entries. For the moment, I’ll simply observe that Freud appears to signal that the essay’s heuristic of “a fiction like this” — a “Just-So Story” (69) or “scientific myth” (86), as he names it in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego — belongs in the company of others from philosophical anthropology, social theory, and the history of speculative reflection on culture. One trope seems particularly relevant here: the “state of nature” endowed by social contractarians with such colossal theoretical significance. My intuition is that, for Freud, the psyche’s transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle parallels a community’s emergence from a state of nature into a political (or proto-political) order of some kind. (Of course, in texts like Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, Freud postulates his own psychoanalytic variant of this myth stricto sensu.)

Likewise, the ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding the state of nature in early modern philosophy are echoed in Freud’s descriptions of intrapsychic development. A condition governed by the pleasure-principle is blind, anarchical, edenic, inhuman, savage. But the progress won by the psyche in assimilating the reality principle — in evolving the competencies demanded by it — is similarly equivocal, or seems to involve commensurable gains and losses.

A moment later, Freud will suggest that these losses are subsequently memorialized by religion. But not only is religion powerless to transcend this tragedy; even science cannot totally “conquer” the pleasure-principle. I will return to these thoughts in another entry.