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

Summary

The last two entries contained a philosophical “interlude” inspired by some of Freud’s bolder suggestions in “Formulations.” In a moment I’ll return to my commentary on the text itself. But first, to summarize the main ideas of Freud’s essay thus far: neurosis involves a failure adequately to reckon with “reality,” “turning away” from it; any relation to reality per se — healthy or impaired — emerges relatively late in the psyche’s development (both phylogenetically and ontogenetically); hence the emergence of reality-testing [Realitätsprüfung] (222) is preceded by a epoch during which no such faculty exists.

During this first, archaic phase, the psyche operates with more primitive faculties, corresponding to a more primitive principle, namely, the pleasure principle. More specifically, as Freud later puts things, “the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for a yield of pleasure, and avoid unpleasure” (223). In fact, from the standpoint of this “pleasure-ego” — prolonged in the species and the individual in the artifact of the unconscious — it is virtually impossible to distinguish its “wish” from anything else, since the psyche itself (as yet) honors no such distinctions. This, we saw, is the essentially “omnipotent” kernel of primary process thinking, as it is still discernible in the adult unconscious:

“The strangest characteristic of unconscious (repressed) processes, to which no investigator can become accustomed without the exercise of great self-discipline, is due to their entire disregard of reality-testing; they equate reality of thought with external actuality, and wishes with their fulfillment — with the event — just as happens automatically under the dominance of the ancient pleasure principle.” (225)

That is to say, in its perfectly purified form, a psyche of the sort described has no need, hence no ability, to make those discriminations — between subject and object, or desire and fact — that eventually underly the idea of “reality.” (In the mature piece, “Negation” (1925), Freud treats the emergence of such conceptual dichotomies in a slightly different way.)

Yet according to Freud’s description of the psyche’s “momentous step,” the pressures of frustration eventually curb the pleasure principle’s unrestricted reign and compel the adoption of the “reality principle” and “secondary process” thinking (albeit always only to varying degrees). How exactly does this occur?

Initially, we found, the pleasure-ego’s hallucinatory omnipotence does yield a limited satisfaction or tension-reduction. Indeed, Freud believes that precisely this sort of satisfaction, offered by dreams, is still a precondition of the adult’s sleep. (“Dreams are the guardians of sleep.”) Yet the psyche must finally recognize “reality,” however unpleasant the experience, when its efforts to wish reality away — to hallucinate its satisfaction — no longer “work.” The old strategy yields diminishing returns, as it were. Our running commentary concluded with a passage that compresses this transition into a few lines, which should by now seem clearer:

“[Initially], whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens to-day with our dream-thoughts every night. 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. 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)

We will now return to our commentary.

Commentary

The failure of hallucination to bridge the “gap” separating a desire from its satisfaction — the experience of a literal “disillusionment” [Enttäuschung] — compels the psyche into a more objective reckoning with its environment: “In the first place, the new demands made a succession of adaptations necessary in the psychical apparatus” (219-220).

The drive for pleasure alone can no longer be trusted to directly regulate action — though “action” is perhaps anachronistic as a descriptor of the pleasure-ego’s “instinctive” movements. Nor again does “repression” suffice, “psychical activity [that] draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure” (219), a mechanism that, in Freud’s more technical language, “excluded from cathexis as productive of unpleasure some of the emerging ideas” (221). After a point, again, this capacity simply to exclude displeasing ideas also fails its own aim.

In fact, Freud’s descriptions here create the impression that the psyche originally had very few options available to it. Evidently, this pleasure-ego can only

1. “expand” towards pleasure,

2. “withdraw” from unpleasure, and

3. where physical withdrawal is precluded — that is, vis-à-vis the drives’ inner excitations — it can only “exclude ideas” of the offending sensation.

This last  faculty, of course, essentially constitutes the “hallucinatory” strategy of tension-reduction.

Freud continues that the insufficiency of these few capacities for realizing pleasure-aims now necessitates others. These are, indeed, the characteristically “human” capacities, all of which combine to serve the reality principle that now descends upon psychic life. This suite of capacities includes:

1. finer “sense-organs” that register the “external world” (220);

2. a more powerful “consciousness” that is “attached” to these sense-organs (220);

3. a mobile “attention” that continually takes stock of the environment, providing useful “data” in the event of an “urgent inner need”(220);

4. “notation,” conceived as one sub-type of the broader genus “memory” (220);

5. an “impartial passing of judgment,” which displaces the more primitive action of “repression” (221)

6. deliberate, reality-modifying “action” in the strict sense, something surpassing in refinement the mere “motor discharge” evinced by the pleasure-ego (221); and

7. a “process of thinking” that itself introduces “restraint upon motor discharge,” or which allows “the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus while the process of discharge is postponed” (221). Such thinking essentially amounts to foresight, “an experimental kind of acting.” (In Frankland’s less cumbersome translation: “a trial run of an action” (5).)

This last development is arguably the cardinal achievement in restricting the reign of the pleasure principle — supported, to be sure, by each of the other capacities. For proper “thinking,” “essentially a trial run of an action,” is ultimately what decouples the “impulse” from its “discharge.” In a psyche entirely bound by the pleasure principle, by contrast, there is a fundamental identity between the two: to have an impulse for expansion or withdrawal is to submit to that impulse, to express it through the shortest possible route. The thought process introduces distance, a pause. The psyche now “tolerate[s] an increased tension of stimulus while the process of discharge is postponed.”

I’ll continue to develop these ideas in the next entry.