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

A Summary

As we have seen, Freud conjectures that the “unconscious mental processes” (219) isolated by psychoanalysis are “the older, primary processes” (219) — enduring “residues” (219) or “remnants” (219) of a pre-history during which they ruled (relatively) uncontested. Then as now, primary process functions according to the pleasure principle, artlessly striving after pleasure and withdrawing from unpleasure.

The proximate cause of the “momentous step” which interests Freud — from the pleasure principle to a more encompassing “reality principle” that somehow preserves and qualifies the former — is an inner excitation that (ultimately) strains the pleasure principle: “the state of equilibrium in the psyche was originally disrupted by the urgent demand of inner needs” (219; 3 in Frankland’s translation]).

The stock response of the psyche to these needs, when governed by primary process, is an “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” (219). That is: “whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night” (219). And initially — for eons, perhaps — this strategy worked: it provided the psyche enough satisfaction that it had no need for any other, more “reality responsive” strategy.

Yet when some variable threshold is crossed, Freud claims, the limited and temporary satisfaction afforded by “merely” hallucinating the desired object no longer suffices. Freud calls this threshold of frustration in the life of the individual and the species a “disillusionment” [Enttäuschung] (219) — arguably the template to which all subsequent disillusionments conform. (After all: “disillusioning” experiences are surely those in which a wish-laden picture of “reality” can no longer withstand the latter’s incursions.)

Hence the psyche requires a new strategy, now that the limitations of frustration-alleviating “hallucination” have been felt:

“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)

This, in any case, is how Freud puts things in the body of the essay — bold, universal, unequivocal.

Caveat: The Pleasure Principle and the State of Nature

But we may want to avoid taking Freud’s words here too literally. It is difficult to make sense of an archaic situation such as the one described here, completely dominated by the pleasure principle and primary process. This psyche would lack any conception of wish-independent reality, since such a conception is putatively unnecessary for meeting the entirety of its aims.

Not altogether surprisingly, then, Freud introduces a footnote that virtually retracts the literal force of his claim, instead acknowledging its value as a “just so” heuristic. That is, he accepts that this archaic situation could never have occurred in a completely undiluted form:

“It will rightly be objected that an organization which was a slave to the pleasure principle and neglected the reality of the external world could not maintain itself alive for the shortest time, so that it could not have come into existence at all. The employment of a fiction like this is, however, justified when one considers that the infant — provided one includes with it the care it receives from its mother — does almost realize a psychical system of this kind. It probably hallucinates the fulfillment of its internal needs; it betrays its unpleasure, when there is an increase of stimulus and an absence of satisfaction, by the motor discharge of screaming and beating about with its arms and legs, and it then experiences the satisfaction it has hallucinated. Later, as an older child, it learns to employ these manifestations of discharge intentionally as methods of expressing its feelings” (220)

I will have more to say about this caveat in later entries. For the moment, I’ll simply observe that Freud appears to signal that the essay’s heuristic of “a fiction like this” — a “Just-So Story” (69) or “scientific myth” (86), as he names it in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego — belongs in the company of others from philosophical anthropology, social theory, and the history of speculative reflection on culture. One trope seems particularly relevant here: the “state of nature” endowed by social contractarians with such colossal theoretical significance. My intuition is that, for Freud, the psyche’s transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle parallels a community’s emergence from a state of nature into a political (or proto-political) order of some kind. (Of course, in texts like Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, Freud postulates his own psychoanalytic variant of this myth stricto sensu.)

Likewise, the ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding the state of nature in early modern philosophy are echoed in Freud’s descriptions of intrapsychic development. A condition governed by the pleasure-principle is blind, anarchical, edenic, inhuman, savage. But the progress won by the psyche in assimilating the reality principle — in evolving the competencies demanded by it — is similarly equivocal, or seems to involve commensurable gains and losses.

A moment later, Freud will suggest that these losses are subsequently memorialized by religion. But not only is religion powerless to transcend this tragedy; even science cannot totally “conquer” the pleasure-principle. I will return to these thoughts in another entry.

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

Running Commentary (Continued)

In this entry we will conclude our exegesis of the compact paragraph we’ve been contemplating. The paragraph’s final sentence runs:

“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.”

These lines summarize the results of Freud’s reflections. They also, of course, provide a definition of that “reality principle” which now begins to circumscribe, and to some extent supplant, the operation of the pleasure principle. The introduction of this new principle demands that “what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable.”

While the two components we distinguished in the last entry, theoretical and practical, are both still at issue, the definition provided here explicitly contains only the theoretical side. It has to do with “mental functioning” and the sorts of contents that are admissibly or imperatively “presented in the mind,” namely, those contents that — pleasurable or not — correspond to a wish-independent reality.

Yet as I’ve indicated, the motivational pressures that occasion this new principle are emphatically practical: one resolves to know reality “as it is” as a prerequisite for acting upon it — action that is itself demanded by the unrelieved frustration which the “pleasure principle’s” hallucinatory strategy failed sufficiently to manage. And, indeed, in the following paragraphs Freud catalogues the faculties that evolved in human beings, not merely for apprehending reality in truth-apt ways, but also for modes of behavior that reap the advantages of this enhanced apprehension.

Interlude: On Truth and Untruth

At this point we may note a remarkable feature of Freud’s account. One might suppose that the “default” relation of the psyche to reality is — the occasional error notwithstanding — essentially one of veridical contact. On such a view, the psyche can, must, and does apprehend reality as it is, and this is no extraordinary achievement. On the contrary, what demands explanation are those cases in which contact with reality is lost, or warped by illusion, delusion, and so on — owing, perhaps, to the malfunctioning of our perceptual and cognitive faculties.

In fact, Freud’s essay begins as though this is fundamentally what psychoanalysis must explain: how is it that the neurotic comes to “withdraw” from reality, normal access to which non-neurotics possess as a matter of course? What accounts for the “suspension” of that reality-orientation we ordinarily take for granted?

Yet several paragraphs into “Formulations,” it appears that Freud’s fundamental question is actually much the opposite: given the default, prehistoric, and relatively effective functioning of the psyche according to the pleasure principle, why should it ever establish a veridical relation to reality? It is not the distorted or illusory “conception of the real circumstances in the external world” that begs for explanation. For a psyche strictly governed by the pleasure principle, there is every reason to prefer a pleasurable false idea to a painful true one. Instead, Freud has been eager to show why the psyche would ever be induced to form conceptions of reality that do not necessarily yield pleasure but, in fact seem (initially) to diminish pleasure — and simply because these conceptions are true.

Later in the essay, Freud will soften the starkness of the proposed opposition between these principles. He will allow that the reality principle is less the “repudiation” of the pleasure principle than its prolongation, or its achievement by other means. For the moment, though, we are led to conceive two, qualitatively different, and mutually exclusive modes of thought and behavior: the “two principles of mental functioning” [zwei prinzipien des psychischen geschehens] of the essay’s title. That is:

1. Either one “form[s] a conception” when and because an item, “presented to the mind,” is “agreeable” — and excludes from awareness what is “disagreeable — since such a conception directly reduces the mental tension occasioned by inner excitations, needs, “drives”;

2. Or one admits into awareness “conceptions” of ‘what is the case,’ as it were, notwithstanding such properties as “agreeable” and “disagreeable” — that is, notwithstanding the direct impact of those conceptions on one’s levels of frustration.

Looking ahead, we might say that the pleasure principle surpasses itself “immanently.” It is abandoned, not because it fails to meet some standard of rationality or realism that the archaic psyche would have no earthly motivation for recognizing. On the contrary: the psyche abandons the pleasure principle precisely when and because it fails to deliver the “pleasure” it had promised — when, in other words, the pleasure principle becomes a raw deal according to its own, internal standard of success.

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

Interlude: On the Significance of Frustration

There is apparently something remarkable about the place of “frustration” in Freud’s account, considered as an explanatory item. The pleasure principle purportedly gives way to the reality principle, considerations of truth, for reasons related to frustration. The paradigmatic operation of the pleasure principle, hallucination, fails to deliver sufficient pleasure — or fails to sufficiently forestall unpleasure —and so the psyche must become acquainted with reality, the way things actually are, in order really to modify the sources of unpleasure.

Frustration, in other words, rouses the organism from its “slumber” in a self-enclosed, fantastical, and essentially truth-indifferent realm where wish alone prevails, and compels it to establish contact with reality, to develop a concern for truth. In this respect, frustration bears an enlightening, progressive significance, inasmuch as it motivates the transition from illusion to truth.

Yet as we underscored in our discussion of the essay’s opening paragraph, “frustration” also explains for Freud the organism’s movement in the opposite, regressive direction. After all, this same “awareness of reality” and “concern for truth,” the turn to which is motivated by frustration, may itself become a source of considerable, even intolerable frustration and suffering. Hence the reality-withdrawal constitutive of neurosis:

“We have long observed that every neurosis has as its result, and probably therefore as its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life, an alienating of him from reality…Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable — either the whole or parts of it. The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis which seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their insanity. But in fact every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality.” (218)

Or again: according to Freud’s account, as individuals and as a species, we develop sensory, intellectual, and motor “tools” because they promise to alleviate our suffering and promote our satisfaction. But these same tools, which secure for us a clear-eyed vision of how things stand, so empowering us to act effectively in the world — these tools can undermine their pleasure-affording aims.

It is as though Freud is saying: some contact with reality, some truth, can and does enhance the organism’s satisfaction, at least in the long run; but too much reality, or unqualified reality, or the wrong sort of reality, can potentially diminish or even destroy this satisfaction. The latter may render the cost of reality-testing too dear, and incentivizes the psyche’s regression to its former life under the pleasure principle — a degree of truth-obliviousness — as a superior path (given the circumstances) to pleasure, the relief of suffering.

In sum, frustration evidently turns us toward reality and also away from it, as the case may be.

Running Commentary (Continued) — Introducing the Reality Principle

Let us return now to the paragraph we are investigating, which continues as follows:

“Instead of it [i.e. the attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination], 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”

Having reached that threshold of frustration in which “hallucination” is of no avail — or no longer — the psyche evidently innovates a strategy with two components, theoretical and practical. It is one thing, that is, to (a) construct a veridical “conception” of reality; it is another, to (b) act upon that conception, to “make a real alteration” in that (appropriately grasped) reality.

Presumably, the psyche that pursues its first, hallucinatory strategy, spontaneously forming “conceptions” solely according to its drive-based wishes, has no need for either component. Its non-veridical, or at least arbitrarily veridical conceptions themselves deliver sufficient relief of tension to obviate any calculated, realistic “action.” The aim of reforming reality demands epistemic contact with it, in order to guide that reformation. And this aim is a product, it seems, of a “surplus” frustration which hallucination cannot in a given instance manage.

Such formulations, of course, point to the “primacy of the practical.” Of the two components, that is, the aim of reforming reality is historically and logically prior. Frustration induces such an aim, and that aim, in turn, induces the psyche into “grasping” reality, no longer merely as a function of its desires, but as something independent of these desires — an item the accurate knowledge of which conditions any efficacious “action” upon it. Briefly stated: there first arises a “need” for (frustration-relieving) action; and only consequently a “need” for (action-facilitating) knowledge.

Here we may repurpose one of Freud’s own examples from the Traumdeutung. A thirsty sleeper, who has with mixed success dreamt of drinking water, will upon waking need credible knowledge of his or her real options — whether and where there is water around, and how to make one’s way over to it. Such a transition, the experience of awakening from a dream, would appear to reproduce in miniature an eons-long evolution of the psyche’s interest in, and capacity for reality-testing, “form[ing] a conception of the real circumstances in the external world.” Any appreciable need for such reality-testing would have been forestalled so long as the simpler “satisfaction by means of hallucination” was reliable and sufficient.

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

Running Commentary (Continued)

On the basis of our previous discussions, we gather that Freud is proposing something like the following. Historically and logically, “untruth” is prior to “truth.” Both at its origins and persistently at the deepest layers of mind, “thinking” is not a faculty of truth, but something like a tension-relieving device. Hence it is essentially — in a profoundly paradoxical way — a faculty of self-deception. To be sure, the phrase “self-deception” is perhaps anachronistic as a description of these kinds of processes; it presupposes some “contact” with truth or reality, with respect to which one might be deceived. But a psyche as totally dominated by the pleasure principle as the one Freud imagines in this essay would presumably lack all of the mental and physiological equipment underlying access to reality in the first place.

[Such equipment, which evolves and functions increasingly according to the “reality principle,” is catalogued in the next paragraphs. One may however wish to know how Freud’s account here comports with basic principles of evolution and adaption from natural selection. He must surely believe that, during those eons in which the pleasure principle reigned uncontested, or nearly so, this was not an obstacle to the members of a species surviving to the age of reproduction — that, indeed, thinking that behaves according to this principle effectively promoted that survival, somehow or other.]

The paragraph continues: “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.” Arguably, Freud ought to have included another sentence or clause between the previous sentence and this one. For without saying so explicitly, he has until now strongly indicated that, to some appreciable degree, the initial strategy of hallucinatory omnipotence works. In other words, before intolerable levels of frustration force its “abandonment” — and no sooner — the psyche’s “attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination” enjoyed some (equivocal) success. As Freud described their operation in the previous paragraphs,

“the older, primary processes…strive towards gaining pleasure; psychical activity draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure…Our dreams at night and our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from distressing impressions are remnants of the dominance of this principle and proofs of its power.” (219).

The hallucinations found in dreams and psychosis, liabilities notwithstanding, are surely one effective way to “draw back” or “tear ourselves away from” certain “events” and “distressing impressions.” One fantasizes the presence of something pleasurable, or the absence of something unpleasurable, and this does — albeit temporarily and partially — provide the tension-relief that is sought.

A central plank of Freud’s Traumdeutung is that dreams, as “guardians of sleep,” really do provide some amount of drive gratification, keeping internal excitations to a tolerable enough level to permit the reality-withdrawal that sleep essentially is. Freud himself includes this reminder in a footnote to the last sentence: “The state of sleep is able to re-establish the likeness of mental life as it was before the recognition of reality, because a prerequisite of sleep is a deliberate rejection of reality (the wish to sleep)” (219). Some robust “recognition of reality” encloses sleep on either side. But in sleep itself, such a recognition must be suspended. And this means that the level of frustration which would compel such a recognition must not be reached, must be managed and reduced by the dream activity.

Yet at some point — precisely the hypothetical threshold Freud identifies in this essay — the psyche which behaves in this way suffers “the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction.” Strachey renders the episode a “disappointment,” but Frankland’s “disillusionment” is surely both more accurate and more evocative a translation of Freud’s “Enttäuschung.” The term seems to carry a great semantic weight. The experience is a disappointment, certainly. But more than this, it is dis-illusioning: it demonstrates to the psyche that its entire mode of functioning, its putative contact with reality, the “picture” it has tendentiously formed of its object, are all illusory — hence that the pleasure or relief it affords, too, is somehow illusory.

To summarize: Freud postulates that at some stage in its development, the pleasure-governed psyche — whether the individual or the species, or organic substance generally — undergoes frustration, “the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction,” thus a proper “disillusionment,” with all the resonances of that term. The suckling infant’s imagination of the breast does not adequately relieve its hunger. Nor, perhaps, does the sleeper’s dream, or the tribesperson’s omnipotent, animistic ritual, effectively realize the drive-based “aims” that initially motivate them: quenching thirst, say, or libidinal gratification, or murderous wishes. So the “attempt at satisfaction” must be exchanged for another, more effective strategy.

I will take up this “alternative” in the next entry.

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

Running Commentary (Continued)

I began to argue in the last entry that, with the “peremptory demands of internal needs,” Freud is unmistakably appealing to an early, still relatively inchoate conception of a drive, one he will subsequently describe in “Drives and Their Fates” (1915) in some detail. Indeed, in that later essay, the “the peremptory demands of internal needs” reappear, with minimal change, precisely as the drives themselves:

“A drive…never operates as a force giving a momentary impact but always as a constant one. Moreover, since it impinges not from without but from within the organism, no flight can avail against it. A better term for a drive stimulus is a ‘need.’ What does away with a need is ‘satisfaction.’ This can be attained only by an appropriate (‘adequate’) alteration of the internal source of stimulation” (118-119; I’ve replaced Strachey’s “instinct” with “drive” as a better translation of Freud’s Trieb, for reasons that are well-discussed in the literature)

And again a bit later, in that same essay:

“[T]he nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition… Instinctual stimuli, which originate from within the organism…make far higher demands on the nervous system [than external stimuli] and cause it to undertake involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation…When we further find that the activity of even the most highly developed mental apparatus is subject to the pleasure principle, i.e. is automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series, we can hardly reject the further hypothesis that these feelings reflect the manner in which the process of mastering stimuli takes place — certainly in the sense that unpleasurable feelings are connected with an increase and pleasurable feelings with a decrease of stimulus” (120-121)

A drive is famously just the sort of thing that, emanating from within, puts the mind to work. It is more or less synonymous, depending upon emphasis and the “property” one has in view, with concepts including “need,” “stimulus,” or “pressure.” So, regarding the latter, Freud says:

“By the pressure [Drang] of a drive we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which it represents. The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to all drives; it is in fact their very essence” (122)

What matters, again, is that such third-personal descriptions of drives are also intimately linked to specific, first-personal — phenomenological — sensations. It seems to belong to our everyday conceptions of “pressure” and especially “need” that they are felt as un-pleasurable. Indeed, the greater the “pressure” of a particular unmet “need,” the greater is the suffering it involves. The “build-up” of a need’s “pressure” is per definition “frustrating” — just the sort of equivalence that Freud capitalizes on in his account here. And it forms the conceptual backdrop of that sentence we can now reconsider with fresh eyes:

“I shall be returning to lines of thought which I have developed elsewhere when I suggest that the state of psychical rest [or: equilibrium] was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs.”

The second sentence in our paragraph now runs:

“When this happened, 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.”

Once again, Freud refuses to restrict the application of these comments to any specific object. For all we know, the organism that takes up this “hallucinatory” strategy vis-à-vis the disturbance to its equilibrium is a prehistoric amoeba with its pseudopodia (one of Freud’s favored images, for example in his discussions of narcissism); the first mammal; the first human; or, of course, the infant in which these histories are supposedly sedimented. And the last part of this sentence, which alludes to the Traumdeutung’s central proposition, tells us that Freud’s “object” here also embraces the non-neurotic adult’s experience while asleep.

Indeed, Freud’s assertion that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish — albeit a wish that the adult’s internal censor has distorted beyond clear recognition — now becomes the kernel of all “primary process” mental activity. For such activity is in all events a strategic response to frustration, to the build up of psychic tension originating in drive stimuli, that nonetheless stops short of reality-testing, or thought and behavior “realistically” adapted to an objective situation. Not only in the adult’s dreams, the neurotic’s unconscious, and the infant’s first experiences, but also in the global functioning of our remotest ancestors (Totem and Taboo) — in each of these one will (allegedly) find roughly the same thing.

Confronted with frustration, for such a mentality, “whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner.” The essay as a whole is light on illustration, but we may look to well-known examples from other places in Freud’s writings. Both the infant in the nursery and the tribes-person described in Totem and Taboo “omnipotently” conflate thought-wish with its reality. Or rather, it is scarcely imaginable to either that “wish” and “reality” might not coincide. An infant who is frustrated by the heightening of tension from hunger at first imagines the breast that would satisfy that hunger and, more importantly, apprehends this imagination as a reality. Likewise, at the cultural stage of that mentality profiled in Totem and Taboo, the wish that evil befalls an enemy is perforce recognized as a fait accompli. The many features and mechanisms of primary process (associative, imagistic, contradictory, and so on) are explained for Freud as modes of realizing this omnipotence, hence of subserving the pleasure principle.