Concept
Reality principle
The principle that, in Freud's account, comes to modify the pleasure principle as the mental apparatus learns that hallucinated satisfaction does not bring real relief. It requires the apparatus to form a picture of the real circumstances in the external world and to tolerate delay and detours on the way to satisfaction, through attention, memory, judgement and thinking. Freud set it out in 'Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens' (1911), where it governs the secondary process; it does not abolish the pleasure principle but safeguards it.
Development
1911
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In 'Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning' Freud introduces the reality principle: when hallucinated satisfaction fails, the apparatus must form a conception of the real circumstances in the outside world and seek a real change in them, putting up with delay and unpleasure.
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' Freud introduces the reality principle: when hallucinated satisfaction fails, the apparatus must form a conception of the real circumstances in the outside world and seek a real change in them, putting up with delay and unpleasure.
- 1911 derives from Pleasure 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.
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'.
- 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
- Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning1911Evidence for a relation
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle1920Evidence for a relation