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

Freud has argued that the reality principle supervenes when the psyche’s “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” — the pleasure principle’s modus operandi — fails to redeem its promise: to secure pleasure and relieve frustration. When this threshold is reached, the “pleasure-ego’s” instinctive behaviors — probing, shifting, reacting, expanding and contracting, in direct response to the pleasure and unpleasure of inner and outer stimuli — must be subordinated to the behavioral repertoire now being evolved. This repertoire embraces “a succession of adaptations…in the psychical apparatus” (219-220) that respond to the pressures of reality-imperatives.

These adaptations include such capacities as a (heightened) awareness of sensations, deliberate attention to the environment, thought, foresight, retention, and delayed gratification — much of which can perhaps be gathered under the rubric of “executive functioning.”

[The structural model would surely simplify things here. According to Freud’s subsequent schema, the “ego” is essentially that agency representing reality-claims and enabling adaptation to them. In that case, though, a phrase in the essay like “pleasure-ego” seems to become oxymoronic. Hasn’t the psyche qua “ego” subordinated itself to the reality principle? Or again: hasn’t this psyche disentangled itself from the pleasure principle. By contrast, inasmuch as the psyche remains in thrall to the (undiluted) pleasure principle, it is something other than the ego — quintessentially the id. Perhaps this exaggerates things, however. The ego’s “defensive” functions, which basically operate outside of awareness, arguably themselves respond to the pleasure principle; for they too protect the psyche from painful mental contents at the cost of (relative) self-occlusion.]

In any event, Freud describes each of these newfound capacities, consecutively, as adjuncts acquired by the psyche to support its reality program. The promise of these capacities, which together constitute “reality-testing” [Realitätsprüfung], is precisely that they allow the psyche to reach that aim — pleasure, satisfaction, relief — which adherence to the pleasure principle itself failed to reliably deliver.

Now one vital precondition of reality-testing, Freud suggests, is memory, and in what follows I would like to discuss it in detail, since some of its significance is obscure, I think. In the essay, “memory” [Gedächtnis], or at least the component of it designated “notation” [Merken], is intimately connected with faculties of environment-monitoring or “attention” [Aufmerksamkeit]:

“A special function was instituted which had periodically to search the external world, in order that its data might be familiar already if an urgent internal need should arise — the function of attention [Aufmerksamkeit]. Its activity meets the sense-impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance. At the same time, probably, a system of notation [Merken] was introduced, whose task it was to lay down the results of this periodical activity of consciousness — a part of what we call memory [Gedächtnis]” (220-221)

[The seeming pun of “Merken” on “Aufmerksamkeit” is lost in Strachey’s “attention” and “notation.” The association is preserved, however — deliberately or not — in Frankland’s choice of “attention” and “retention” for the two.]

We may distinguish several ingredients in what is essentially a “functional” account:

1. As before, the “urgent internal need[s]” which may at any time overwhelm the psyche are the foundation of Freud’s account. The pleasure-ego’s “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” was finally inadequate to these “needs.” And the mounting frustration occasioned by their non-satisfaction is what compels a reckoning with reality.

2. In particular: once the psyche resolves to satisfy its needs, not via hallucinatory omnipotence, but via “a real alteration” in “the real circumstances in the external world” (219), then some kind of “attention” to those circumstance — yielding useful “data” about it — logically follows. After all, the various sources of satisfaction and frustration in the psyche’s environment are of no advantage so long as this psyche possess no “data” concerning their existence, properties, and so on.

3. Moreover, this attention is proactive; it “periodically…search[es] the external world” and “meets the sense-impressions half way, instead of awaiting their appearance.” In other words, the “attending” psyche is no longer passively constrained to whichever sensations “happen” upon it, but is now empowered to orient itself.

4. Yet surely the data accumulated via this proactive attention is itself of no use to a psyche which cannot store and access it, as required. A data-yielding attention that totally lacked retention — were such a thing even conceivable — would lose its data the very moment it is won. Accordingly, if an “urgent internal need” were to arise, such a retention-less psyche would be no better positioned to exploit its environment for satisfaction than a psyche which lacked “attention” altogether.

I will comment more on this passage in the next entry.