Concept
Pleasure principle
In Freud's metapsychology, the tendency of mental functioning to avoid unpleasure and obtain pleasure, understood economically as the lowering or discharge of excitation. Freud set it beside the reality principle in 1911 as the rule of the primary process. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he asked what lies beyond it, and found in the repetition compulsion, and behind it the death drive, a tendency that overrides it.
Development
1911
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning' (1911), Freud named the tendency governing the primary processes the pleasure-unpleasure principle, or pleasure principle, and set the reality principle beside it.
In Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911)
Relations
- 1911 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning' (1911), Freud named the tendency governing the primary processes the pleasure-unpleasure principle, or pleasure principle, and set the reality principle beside it.
- 1911 gave rise to Reality principle
Freud presents the reality principle not as a rival to the pleasure principle but as its modification: it gives up a momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, only to secure a later and surer one. Beyond the Pleasure Principle repeats that the reality principle replaces the pleasure principle under the ego's drives of self-preservation without abandoning its aim.
- 1919 opposed by Repetition compulsion
Freud describes a compulsion to repeat that springs from the drives and is strong enough to override the pleasure principle. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) works this out: the compulsion repeats even experiences that never brought pleasure, and so works beyond, and against, the pleasure principle.
Works
- 1911
Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning
Freud's short paper of 1911 sets out how the mind comes to take account of the external world. It starts from the observation that every neurosis estranges the patient from some part of reality. The older, primary processes, which survive in the unconscious, obey the pleasure principle: they strive for pleasure, draw back from unpleasure, and at first satisfy a need by hallucinating its object. Only when the expected satisfaction fails to come is the mental apparatus forced to represent real circumstances and seek real change, and so the reality principle is installed. The paper lists the adaptations this brings: attention, a system of notation that forms part of memory, judgement in place of repression, motor discharge turned into action, and thinking as experimental acting that allows discharge to be delayed. Phantasying splits off and stays under the pleasure principle. The sexual drives, kept autoerotic and then halted by latency, are educated to reality later than the ego drives, which lays down a disposition to neurosis. The paper then treats religion, science, education and art as different settlements between the two principles, and ties the choice of neurosis to the phase at which development was inhibited. It closes by warning that in the unconscious, thought-reality counts as external reality, so the analyst must reckon in 'neurotic currency'.
- 1919
Freud's essay, published in the fifth volume of Imago in 1919, takes up a question he says aesthetics has neglected: what sets the uncanny apart within the wider class of the frightening. Against Ernst Jentsch, who in 1906 traced the feeling to intellectual uncertainty before the new and unfamiliar, Freud argues that the uncanny is the kind of fright that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. He reaches this by two routes. The first is linguistic: entries from the dictionaries of Sanders and of the Grimms show heimlich ranging from 'homely, familiar' to 'concealed, secret', until it coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Schelling's remark that the uncanny is whatever ought to have remained hidden and has come to light becomes a key to the essay. The second route is a survey of uncanny experiences and fictions. Reading E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman', Freud places the story's effect not in the automaton Olimpia but in the figure who tears out children's eyes, and reads the fear for the eyes as a substitute for castration anxiety, with the good and the bad father split across the tale's paired figures. Following Otto Rank's study of the double, he shows the double turning from an insurance against death, born of primary narcissism, into a harbinger of death, and links it to the self-observing, self-critical agency in the ego. Involuntary repetition of the same, which he ties to a compulsion to repeat in the unconscious, the omnipotence of thoughts, the evil eye, the return of the dead, severed limbs, being buried alive, and the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality are traced in turn to infantile complexes or to surmounted animistic beliefs. The female genitals, which neurotic men often call uncanny, he reads as the entrance to the human being's first home: the prefix 'un-' is the mark of repression. In the last section Freud concedes that his thesis cannot be reversed, and that fairy tales abound in wish-fulfilments and animated objects that are not uncanny at all. He answers these objections by separating the uncanny of experience from the uncanny of fiction and, within experience, the uncanny that comes from repressed infantile complexes from the uncanny that arises when surmounted primitive beliefs seem confirmed once more. Fiction can suspend reality-testing and so spare us the uncanny, as in fairy tales, in Dante, or in Shakespeare's ghosts, or it can heighten the uncanny beyond anything life allows when the writer pretends to stay within common reality. The uncanny of repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. Because the writer also steers the reader's identification and mood, the same material can turn comic, as in Nestroy or in Wilde's 'The Canterville Ghost'. The uncanniness of solitude, silence and darkness Freud leaves tied to the anxiety of childhood.
- 1920
The essay in which Freud revised his theory of the drives. He starts from facts the pleasure principle does not account for: the dreams of the traumatic neuroses, including the war neuroses, which keep returning the patient to the accident; a small child’s game of throwing away a reel so that it is “gone” (fort) and pulling it back with a joyful “there” (da); and the patient in analysis who, instead of remembering the repressed, repeats it in the transference. From these he infers a compulsion to repeat that seems more original, more elementary and more drive-like than the pleasure principle. Trauma is described as excitation strong enough to break through the mind’s protective shield against stimuli, leaving it the task of binding the incoming quantities. Freud then proposes that the drives are conservative, striving to restore an earlier state, so that “the aim of all life is death”, and he sets death drives against the life or sexual drives, the libido he identifies with the Eros of the poets and philosophers. Biological findings on natural death and on the immortality of protists neither confirm nor remove the hypothesis, and he holds to the distinction between death drives and life drives, adding that the pleasure principle seems to serve the death drives. A footnote acknowledges that Sabina Spielrein had anticipated a good part of this speculation.
See also
People
References
- The 'Uncanny'1919Evidence for a relation
- Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning1911Evidence for a relation
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle1920Evidence for a relation