Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) (X)
Philosophical Interlude: Reason and Impulse (II)
In the last entry we considered a passage in which Freud appears to summarize the implications for morality, and culture more generally, of the “momentous step” outlined in “Formulations.” Here Freud makes a point that verges on the philosophical:
“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. 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)
What does is mean for human life that categories of “pleasure” and “unpleasure” give way increasingly, though never entirely, to those of “use” and “damage?” For surely these polarities are not merely third-personal descriptions of psychic functioning, or inner “forces” we’ve postulated to explain our observations. They are also deeply-felt moral criteria around which we may regulate — or fail or regulate — our behavior.
Both polarities have had philosophical advocates, though on the conventional view, a principal mark of moral development is precisely the capacity and inclination to subdue unruly “impulses” on behalf of some more durable and grounded ideal. In Aristotle’s ancient codification, a flourishing soul has habituated its “appetitive” parts into conformity with its rational designs; in Harry Frankfurt’s language, first-order desires are made to harmonize substantially with the second-order kind. Ideally, and broadly speaking, I have and enact only those inclinations I desire to have and enact.
Of course, this is a historically popular candidate for the unique differentia of human beings, in contrast to other entities, such as non-human animals. We are more than instinctive creatures. That is, we are not merely servile to whichever fleeting, capricious, and unbidden impulses we happen to experience. Beyond this — and provided such things as maturation, effort, and a good will — we are also capable of acting on the basis of reasons that do not immediately answer to our impulses. Indeed, these are reasons that regulate and occasionally thwart our impulses.
I noted last time that, in the early modern period, David Hume seemed to problematize this entire conception, arguing that “reason” — where such a thing exists — is not an autonomous ruler of our desires, but their natural prolongation. To repeat his mot: “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.”
But this Humean skepticism is precisely the philosophical space in which to situate Freud’s remarks, quoted above. The idea that the reality principle is nothing but the pleasure principle by other means renders futile — even unintelligible — any project to finally “overcome” the former. For any such project could only ever facilitate the pleasure principle in more or less disguised form. For just this reason, Freud now describes both religion and science (of which psychoanalysis, of course, is one sector) as follows:
“The doctrine of reward in the after-life for the — voluntary or enforced — renunciation of earthly pleasures is nothing other than a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. Following consistently along these lines, religions have been able to effect absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future existence; but they have not by this means achieved a conquest of the pleasure principle. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in that conquest; science too, however, offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain in the end” (223-224).
In fact there are values that belong to each stage of the development he has charted. Not only does each principle bring with it functions suited to its “aims”; these aims have dimensions that strike both us and the psyche itself as moral, as more or less “ideal,” and which thus figure in Freud’s descriptions of religion and science, and subsequently education and art.
This clarifies the relation of these principles to seemingly remote developments in culture. But it is also emblematic of a central knot in philosophical treatments of psychoanalysis — or perhaps in the philosophical infrastructure of psychoanalysis itself. What, after all, is the connection between
psychoanalytic “principles,” which put on airs of governing human thought and behavior in the inexorable way that gravitational laws govern bodies in space; and
such items as norms, values, ideals, and finally the ethical systems that gather them up into a coherent view of life?
Unsurprisingly, the drift of the quoted passages is “reductive.” We may conceive this transition as lifting the psyche from a “hedonic” to a more “utilitarian” outlook — from “pleasure” to “use.” But this, it seems, is merely the ideological appearance these natural-scientific principles have for the psyche subjected to first one, then the other. They are ex post facto mythical and religious rationalizations of the transformation, hardly autonomous explanations. These changes neither abrogate Freud’s principles nor substantiate the primacy of ideal over real, value over fact — as philosophers may naively imagine — but are simply the prolongation of these principles, albeit with all the additional sophistication that culture affords. In this way, however, the account in “Formulations” illustrates one area in which Freud’s “enlightenment” program appears to devour itself.