Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924) (VI)
We are continuing our account of the opening sections of “Economic Problem” — in particular, a thorny paragraph that reflects a number of obscurities and ambiguities in Freud’s position. At this point, Freud infers from his reflections to the following result:
“In this way we obtain a small but interesting set of connections. The Nirvana principle expresses the trend of the death instinct; the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido; and the modification of the latter principle, the reality principle, represents the influence of the external world.”
Once again, the simplicity of Freud’s formulations conceal a certain amount of complexity. To what “connections” do the foregoing reflections entitle us, really?
[I will not speak in this entry of the third “connection,” namely, the development of the pleasure principle into the reality principle under the impact of frustration. This is the well-known theme of “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) and — apart from its relative cogency — is fairly independent of Freud’s concerns in “Economic Problem.” I will focus instead on the other two propositions.]
First: “The Nirvana principle expresses the trend of the death instinct.” Of the two, this “thesis” poses less difficulty. We saw above that the Nirvana principle “belongs” to the death drive, that is, it expresses the characteristic lawfulness of this “power.” Hence the “function” that Freud had from early on attributed to the mental apparatus — keeping “excitations" to the lowest possible point — instantiates the death drive, the universal biological trend of reversion to an inert, inorganic condition.
Second: “the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido.” Our real difficulties begin here. Freud’s intention, of course, is to establish a transparent symmetry. The two principles — the Nirvana and pleasure principles — would accordingly express between them the lawfulness of the two drives. In the first case, we said, this connection seems acceptable enough: the excitation-discharging mental apparatus at least evinces a “kinship” with the death drive, inasmuch as it thereby tends to “conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic state” (414). (And early on — say, at the time of “Drives and Their Fates” (1915) — Freud’s only “third-personal” principle was just this “constancy” principle.)
But the relation of the pleasure principle to libido or Eros is not nearly so simple. Or rather, more precisely: the relation between the two items — the principle and the drive — might be equally simple, if we really knew what Freud meant by either. His meaning is far from clear, however. Consider the following points:
The “pleasure principle,” while affording some kind of regular apprehension of our “economics" — states of inner excitations — does not necessarily “map on” to anything quantitative. That is, pleasure and pain do not depend directly on the amounts of inner stimulation, but on some “quality” they share. (Perhaps, Freud volunteers, these feelings register the special “rhythm” in the rise and fall of excitations, rather than the excitations per se.) In any case, if only owing to this uncertainty, we cannot possibly make sense of Freud’s second proposition — “the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido” — as we did with the first. To be sure, we can say that, whatever it is, the pleasure principle serves Eros. But with regard to the very thing we want to know most — namely, the relation of the pleasure principle to its seeming antipode, the Nirvana principle — we are seemingly in the dark.
In fact, our entitlement to the term “antipode” in the present context is itself doubtful. For the Nirvana principle and pleasure principle are not necessarily at cross-purposes. Indeed, as we have repeatedly observed, until the time of this essay, Freud felt no real need to distinguish them at all. In many, perhaps the majority of cases, pleasure does coincide with a "reduction of tension” — the “aim” towards which the death drive and its Nirvana principle tend, as well. Freud underscores this ordinary coincidence in the very next sentence: “None of these three principles [i.e. the “Nirvana,” “pleasure,” and “reality” principles] is actually put out of action by another. As a rule they are able to tolerate one another, although conflicts are bound to arise occasionally from the fact of the differing aims that are set for each” (415).
This is perhaps one place at which we feel Freud’s equivocal treatment of the drive concept most acutely. A drive, both in Freud’s early writings and (for the most part) in the present essay, is an inner excitation or stimulus pressing for discharge. But alongside this concept of drive, and rather problematically related to it, is another, “late” concept”: a drive is a “function,” either of unification (Eros) or dissolution (Thanatos). Here we will acknowledge an irony, both of Freud’s self-understanding and the reception of his work. The received wisdom regarding Freud’s intellectual development — propounded, of course, by Freud himself — is something like the following. Initially, Freud only recognized the libidinal and self-preservative drives. Later, however, both of these are folded into Eros, while another “drive” — the mysterious and problematic Thanatos — is “introduced” in opposition to it. Yet as we have been arguing, the reality of this conceptual change is considerably more complicated. In fact, the drive that Freud initially designated “libido,” inasmuch it was essentially regulated by the “constancy” principle, was nothing other than an early iteration of the death drive. Hence the conceptual development was not exactly that the libidinal and self-preservative drives were together counterposed to a new innovation, the “death drive,” forced upon Freud by clinical observation (the “repetition compulsion," for example), and elaborated by biological speculation. Rather the development was something like: a piece of Freud’s original notion of the libido (that piece directly regulated by the constancy principle) was separated off as the “death drive.”
The drive of Eros poses analogous ambiguities. On the one hand, first-personally, this drive may be linked to the “qualities” of “pleasure” and “unpleasure.” (In this case, indeed, “the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido” — at least as a rule.) On the other hand, though, by this point in Freud’s development he’d ascribed to Eros a third-personal trend. That is to say: if the operation of Eros is subjectively experienced in terms of “pleasure” and “unpleasure,” this same operation is objectively — in reality — one of “unification” or “combination.” . In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for instance, Freud had already identified “the efforts of Eros to combine organic substances into ever larger unities” (42-43); or again, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, “the tendency which proceeds from the libido and which is felt by all living beings of the same kind, to combine in more and more comprehensive units” (118). Finally, in Civilization and its Discontents: “…I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process which mankind undergoes, and I am still under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this” (69). But if this is so, then a number of additional problems arise. For Freud would be obliged to supplement his middle proposition — “the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido” — with another, along the lines of: “the unification principle [also] represents the demands of the libido.” And now we are left to draw the puzzling inference that the activity of unification and the sensation of pleasure — the aims of Eros — are hypothetically synonymous. I call this puzzling because, again, on the basis of Freud’s position before this text, and to some extent afterwards, one would expect roughly the opposite: that pleasure generally speaking follows from the diminishment of excitation and tension, and emphatically not from their increase. But the idiom of “combination” and “unification” implies something else entirely: not the attempt to reduce tension to the bare minimum, or “to conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of of the inorganic state” (414), but precisely to elicit such tension and so propound “the restlessness of life.”
In view of these ambiguities and questions, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in one of his last pieces, An Outline of Psychoanalysis — published posthumously in 1940 — Freud effectively recants those “connections” stipulated in the paragraph we’ve been examining. He writes:
“The consideration that the pleasure principle demands a reduction, at bottom the extinction perhaps, of the tensions of instinctual needs (that is, Nirvana) leads to the still unassessed relations between the pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct” (198).
Here, it seems to me, Freud all but obliterates the distinctions painstakingly drawn in “Economic Problem.” First, the Nirvana and Pleasure principles are once more equated: they both entail the “reduction, at bottom the extinction perhaps, of the tensions of instinctual needs.” (At least Freud raises this idea as a “consideration.”) Second, and even more jarringly, Freud explicitly concedes that the “relations between the pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct” are at the time of his writing, that is, in 1938, “still unassessed.”
Such an “assessment," of course, is exactly what Freud appeared to provide in “Economic Problem.” To repeat his words from above: “The Nirvana principle expresses the trend of the death instinct; the pleasure principle represents the demands of the libido.” If in 1938 Freud could write that these same relations were “still unassessed,” it suggests to me that he was no longer satisfied with his statements from 1924, and that he drew back from all of the questions they raised about his drive theory.