Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924) (I)

My impression is that Freud’s “Economic Problem” is more frequently discussed, or alluded to, than read. On the evidence, it is best known for the questions it raises about Freud’s early conception of drives. I have discussed these questions extensively in previous entries and won’t reproduce all of the details here. Suffice it to recall that Freud’s early drive “model” implicitly undergoes at least three fundamental alterations between the time of “Drives and Their Fates” and the mature thinking inaugurated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle. These alterations are

1. Taxonomic — Freud no longer speaks of “self-preserving” and “libidinal” drives, but of Eros (which embraces both of the former) and Thanatos

2. Structural — whatever their labels or types, drives are no longer inner excitations, acting upon the mind, pressing for discharge, but universal functions of unification and dissolution

3. Functional — relatedly, these drives are no longer bound to the so-called “constancy principle.” The mind’s putative telos of restoring homeostasis when it has been lost, reducing excitation to a minimum — with which the “pleasure principle” had long been equated — is now grasped in a more subtle way

Again, these changes were mainly “implicit,” and — as we quickly find in the present essay — Freud frequently reverts to elements of the first model that have seemingly been surpassed by the second. In the opening pages of “Economic Problem,” Freud is especially concerned to disentangle the nexus of concepts involved in “3.” The “problem” identified in the piece’s title refers, at least initially, to this nexus, which the phenomenon of masochism brings to our attention in an unmistakable way.

In the Penguin Freud Library the essay is included in the volume “On Metapsychology.” This decision was undoubtedly made on the basis of its opening pages. For it is really here — before Freud turns in detail to the essay’s nominal topic, masochism — that certain metapsychological concepts receive renewed attention. The compact excursus describes, differentiates, and connects mature ideas of the drives (still in the process of crystallization) with the “principles” governing human mentality and, to some extent, the biological realm more generally (the nirvana, pleasure, and reality principles). And it does this in terms — further — of (economic) quantities and (phenomenological) qualities, with associated vocabulary (more characteristic of the early model) of “excitations,” “tensions,” “aims,” and so on. In short: if a “metapsychology” has centrally to do with establishing the nature and architecture of mind — the “stuff” out of which it is compounded — together with the motivational “principles” governing its activities, then these pages have as strong a claim to the title as anything Freud wrote. In this entry and the following ones, I will provide a running commentary on this section.

The general connection between empirical observation and theoretical system-building is underscored in the first paragraph. (Of course, it continues to surprise both admirers and detractors of Freud’s conceptual “system” that its innovator explicitly disclaimed any such label. Among Freud’s reasons for ejecting Alfred Adler from the psychoanalytic fold was the latter’s pretension to evolving a “system.”) The occasion for Freud’s argument is a perceived discrepancy between

1. certain psychoanalytic doxa regarding the mind, its motivations, and hence the underlying “lawfulness” of its behaviors, and

2. certain clinical data — namely, attitudes, actions, and life-patterns designated “masochistic” — which seem to violate those doxa

More concretely, those neurotic attitudes and behaviors called masochistic appear to challenge the purported hegemony of the “pleasure principle” in mental life.

Now, by the end of these initial remarks, Freud seems to have reconciled this perceived discrepancy — at least to his own satisfaction — such that masochism no longer violates this axiom, but in its own, convoluted way confirms and illustrates it. In order to reach this reconciliation, though, it is first necessary both to clarify the meaning of the pleasure principle (and its relation to several other principles), and, afterwards, to reinterpret masochism itself such that it assorts with the principles thus differentiated. The balance of Freud’s essay is dedicated to this reinterpretation.

(Incidentally, this rhetorical strategy, which involves Freud (a) stating a principle of mind, (b) inviting the reader to share his puzzlement at an observation that evidently violates that principle, before (c) resolving the contradiction — either by reconciling the principle, the observation, or both — is familiar from “Mourning and Melancholia.”)

In the present case, Freud works from both sides at once, encouraging us to re-conceive both masochism and those interrelated principles determining it. Freud begins as follows:

“The existence of a masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as mysterious from the economic point of view. For if mental processes are governed by the pleasure principle in such a way that their first aim is the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure, masochism is incomprehensible. If pain and unpleasure can be not simply warnings but actually aims, the pleasure principle is paralysed—it is as though the watchman over our mental life were put out of action by a drug” (413)

Some of Freud’s meaning in this passage will be cleared up in the following paragraphs. Already, however, a number of questions arise which I think we ought to make explicit, if not answer, straightaway.

1. What is the “masochistic trend in the instinctual life of human beings?”

2. What exactly is contained in the “economic point of view”? — how does such a perspective contrast with other ways, psychoanalytic or otherwise, of viewing the matter?

3. How does the “pleasure principle” relate to, or show up within, the “economic” perspective thus differentiated? — and why should the “masochistic trend” present an economic problem, specifically?

I will continue this commentary in the next entry by taking up these kinds of questions.