Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1920)
Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911)
“We have long observed,” Freud begins, “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.
The unconscious processes are guided by the pleasure principle, meaning that they strive to gain pleasure and avoid unpleasure. We see the pleasure principle at work in our dreams, which Freud sees as the expression of our innermost wishes. We also see the pleasure principle at work in our tendency to avoid painful situations, which of course includes the act of repression. The pleasure principle is also responsible for what he calls “motor discharge.” This discharge unburdens “the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli” by “sending innervations into the interior of the body (leading to expressive movements and the play of features and to manifestations of affect).”
Along with the pleasure principle, we’re also guided by the reality principle, which helps us to discern what is real. The reality principle contains some of the following abilities: consciousness, which allows us to apprehend the reality of the external world; judgment, which allows us to determine whether something in the external world is true or false; and memory, which allows us to remember important facets of the external world. Although it might seem that these two principles work against one another, it seems that the reality principle in fact works to advance the aims of the pleasure principle. Some momentary pleasures, of course, lead to long-term unpleasure, and so the reality principle often steps in to alert that the pleasure principle of such dangers.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
Pleasure Principle and Reality Principle
He next discusses the mental processes that can be observed in the play of children. He observed a little boy who would play a game of throwing household objects behind his bed and later retrieving them, a game of which he found endlessly amusing. Freud in time came to understand that the game was related to an important event in the boy’s life, in time developing the ability to allow his mother to leave him without offering a protest. The boy had undoubtedly not wanted his mother to leave him, and so reenacting this painful event would seem to contradict the pleasure principle.
Freud provides two responses to this argument. First, he points out that the boy is accomplishing something in this reenacting me. In the original situation (his mother leaving him), the boy was passive, but now, in his game, the boy is not just reenacting this event but reenacting it while playing an active role and thus gaining mastery of the event. Second, Freud believes that throwing away the object satisfied the boy’s desire, which had to repress in reality, to enact revenge on his mother for leaving him. By throwing the objects, the boy was essentially saying, “All right, then go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.” And so this boy is deriving pleasure in his act of play in a number of ways — there pleasure in the actual play and a deeper (mostly unconscious) pleasure in exacting his revenge.
Repetition Compulsion
Freud next turns to the repetition compulsion. To explain the repetition compulsion, he first briefly gives a history of psychoanalysis, the the third phase of which focuses on the repetition compulsion.
Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion. This ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on their death-beds.
Just as is the case with the repetitions we find in children’s play, many of these repetitions, upon closer examination, are not incompatible with the pleasure principle. For instance, people often repeat past traumatic events for the sake of repression, i.e., to keep painful feelings unconscious. And yet, Freud concedes, there are instances in which people’s internal compulsion to repeat “overrides the pleasure principle.”
Far-Fetched Speculation: Arguments for the Death Instinct
Freud begins the fourth section of the book with these words: “What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.” He had previously believed that our mental processes are determined by the pleasure principle and the reality principle and that the reality principle in fact serves the pleasure principle. But in what follows he argues that some of our mental processes cannot be reduced to these principles and that in fact there is another existent principle or instinct. He provides three arguments for this new proposition, none of which I completely understand.
Argument #1: The dreams of individuals with traumatic neurosis. Earlier in the book Freud discussed individuals with a traumatic neurosis, noting that the nature of their dreams contradict his previous claim that a dream is an expression of one’s wishes. A traumatized individual’s dream is not an expression of his wishes but rather an attempt to master the traumatic event “by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.” Put differently, traumatized individuals develop a traumatic-neurosis because they experienced fight, not anxiety — fright occurring when someone is exposed to “danger without being prepared for it” and anxiety occurring when one anticipates danger. And so in his dreams, a traumatized person relives the event and in order to move from a state of fright (for which there is no protection) to a state of anxiety (for which one can prepare) and in so doing to gain a feeling of mastery of the traumatic event.
Freud brings all this together, and makes an argument which can be stated as follows: (1) Fright precedes anxiety; (2) When one has experienced fight (but not anxiety), his dreams are not guided by the pleasure principle; (3) Therefore, there is something that precedes the pleasure principle. I understand the logic of this argument but don’t understand the first premise, that fright precedes anxiety. Nonetheless, this is Freud’s argument, at least as I understand it, and if true, it proves to him that there is something “beyond the pleasure principle.”
Argument #2: The repetition compulsions occurring in analysis. Although Freud has argued that two types of repetitions are not incompatible with the pleasure principle (the repetitions found in the play of children and the repetitions found in our life decisions), he says that the repetition that occurs in the analytic transference “disregards the pleasure principle in every way.” He explains: “The patient behaves in a purely infantile fashion and thus shows us that the repressed memory-traces of his primeval experiences are not present in him in a bound state and are indeed in a sense incapable of obeying the secondary process.” I don’t quite understand his argument here.
Argument #3: Other forms of life appear to possess an instinctual urge to return to an earlier state. For example, certain fishes and birds often migrate to faraway places once inhabited by their ancestors. If we follow this argument to its natural conclusion, it follows that we ultimately long to die. The argument for this proposition can be stated as follows: (1) All living organisms ultimately long to return to their earlier states; (2) The earliest state for living organisms was pre-birth, being in an inanimate state; (3) Living organisms therefore desire to return to their inanimate state, which would obviously be death.
If we accept the above arguments, then we must concede the existence of what he calls the death instincts (or ego instincts). He believes that the death instincts are not our only instincts, as the sexual instincts work against them. “One group of instincts,” he writes, “rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.”
“We have long observed,” Freud begins, “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.
The unconscious processes are guided by the pleasure principle, meaning that they strive to gain pleasure and avoid unpleasure. We see the pleasure principle at work in our dreams, which Freud sees as the expression of our innermost wishes. We also see the pleasure principle at work in our tendency to avoid painful situations, which of course includes the act of repression. The pleasure principle is also responsible for what he calls “motor discharge.” This discharge unburdens “the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli” by “sending innervations into the interior of the body (leading to expressive movements and the play of features and to manifestations of affect).”
Along with the pleasure principle, we’re also guided by the reality principle, which helps us to discern what is real. The reality principle contains some of the following abilities: consciousness, which allows us to apprehend the reality of the external world; judgment, which allows us to determine whether something in the external world is true or false; and memory, which allows us to remember important facets of the external world. Although it might seem that these two principles work against one another, it seems that the reality principle in fact works to advance the aims of the pleasure principle. Some momentary pleasures, of course, lead to long-term unpleasure, and so the reality principle often steps in to alert that the pleasure principle of such dangers.
Freud ends his paper by emphasizing that the unconscious is guided by the pleasure principle and seems completely oblivious to the reality principle. Our unconscious processes “equate reality of thought with external actuality, and wishes with their fulfillment—with the event—just as happens automatically under the dominance of the ancient pleasure principle.” This has enormous ramifications for clinical work. As Freud writes, we must not “be misled into applying the standards of reality to repressed psychical structures, and on that account, perhaps, into undervaluing the importance of phantasies in the formation of symptoms on the ground that they are not actualities, or into tracing a neurotic sense of guilt back to some other source because there is no evidence that any actual crime has been committed.”
* * * * *
Pleasure Principle and Reality Principle
Our mental life is regulated by the pleasure principle, meaning that we spend our lives aiming to increase pleasure and to avoid unpleasure. When we experience an increase in pleasure, we can be said to experience a decrease in the quantity of excitation, and when we experience a decrease in pleasure, we can be said to experience an increase in the quantity of excitation.
Of course, the pleasure principle isn’t the only mental force at play. There’s also the reality principle, which works to support the pleasure principle. The reality principle often recognizes that obtaining short-term pleasure ruins one’s chances of obtaining more meaningful long-term pleasure and therefore will sometimes encourage us to act accordingly.
Apparent Contradictions of the Pleasure Principle
Of course, the pleasure principle isn’t the only mental force at play. There’s also the reality principle, which works to support the pleasure principle. The reality principle often recognizes that obtaining short-term pleasure ruins one’s chances of obtaining more meaningful long-term pleasure and therefore will sometimes encourage us to act accordingly.
Apparent Contradictions of the Pleasure Principle
Freud next address some facts that might be interpreted as evidence that the pleasure principle is not our primary guiding principle.
Traumatic Neurosis
He first discusses what today we would call PTSD, referring to it as “traumatic neurosis” and noting that the Great War resulted in several cases of this. He notes two characteristics of traumatic neuroses: they are caused by unexpected traumatic events, and they result in an injury which prevents the development of a neurosis.
Such individuals often have dreams in which they re-experience the traumatic event. This seems to contradict Freud’s belief that dreams are expressions of our wishes. Put differently, this seems to contradict the primacy of the pleasure principle. This argument can be stated as follows: you say that in our dreams, the unconscious is expressing wishes and thus create pleasurable experiences; however these individuals have dreams in which they re-experience unpleasurable experience; and so what’s at work in these individuals seems to be, not a pleasure principle, but a masochism principle. Freud responds to this apparent contradiction by writing that in these individuals “the function of dreaming, like so much else, is upset” and “diverted from its purposes.” To use a modern analogy, the pleasure principle is hard-wired into our brains, but traumatic events can damage and alter this hard-wiring.
Children's Play
Such individuals often have dreams in which they re-experience the traumatic event. This seems to contradict Freud’s belief that dreams are expressions of our wishes. Put differently, this seems to contradict the primacy of the pleasure principle. This argument can be stated as follows: you say that in our dreams, the unconscious is expressing wishes and thus create pleasurable experiences; however these individuals have dreams in which they re-experience unpleasurable experience; and so what’s at work in these individuals seems to be, not a pleasure principle, but a masochism principle. Freud responds to this apparent contradiction by writing that in these individuals “the function of dreaming, like so much else, is upset” and “diverted from its purposes.” To use a modern analogy, the pleasure principle is hard-wired into our brains, but traumatic events can damage and alter this hard-wiring.
Children's Play
He next discusses the mental processes that can be observed in the play of children. He observed a little boy who would play a game of throwing household objects behind his bed and later retrieving them, a game of which he found endlessly amusing. Freud in time came to understand that the game was related to an important event in the boy’s life, in time developing the ability to allow his mother to leave him without offering a protest. The boy had undoubtedly not wanted his mother to leave him, and so reenacting this painful event would seem to contradict the pleasure principle.
Freud provides two responses to this argument. First, he points out that the boy is accomplishing something in this reenacting me. In the original situation (his mother leaving him), the boy was passive, but now, in his game, the boy is not just reenacting this event but reenacting it while playing an active role and thus gaining mastery of the event. Second, Freud believes that throwing away the object satisfied the boy’s desire, which had to repress in reality, to enact revenge on his mother for leaving him. By throwing the objects, the boy was essentially saying, “All right, then go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.” And so this boy is deriving pleasure in his act of play in a number of ways — there pleasure in the actual play and a deeper (mostly unconscious) pleasure in exacting his revenge.
Freud next turns to the repetition compulsion. To explain the repetition compulsion, he first briefly gives a history of psychoanalysis, the the third phase of which focuses on the repetition compulsion.
- Phase #1: It was the analyst’s job to discover unconscious material that was hidden from the patient and at the right moment communicate this material to the patient.
- Phase #2: Realizing the deficiencies of the first phase (Freud doesn’t elaborate), the analyst focused on uncovering the patient’s resistance, and, relying on the power of positive transference, he tried to convince the patient to give up these resistances. The analyst would then encourage the patient to confirm the analyst’s interpretations by sharing childhood memories. However, this didn’t work because the patient often could not remember much of these memories and could not always remember the essential part of what he could remember.
- Phase #3: Realizing the deficiencies of the second phase (namely, that the patient’s memory is limited), the analyst began to turn much of his attention to the transference, knowing that what the patient had repressed (and could not remember) would get acted out (and thus repeated) in the transference. In these repetitions, the earlier transference would be replaced by the transference-neurosis. The analyst would try his hardest to limit the patient’s acting out and to elicit the patient’s memories.
Prima facie it seems that the repetition compulsion is incompatible with the pleasure principle, as the majority of what is repeated are events that initially cause unpleasure. Before providing an answer to this seemingly inconvenient truth, Freud expounds on the repetition compulsion, describing how it appears not only in analysis but also in the lives of many individuals:
Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés, however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion. This ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on their death-beds.
Just as is the case with the repetitions we find in children’s play, many of these repetitions, upon closer examination, are not incompatible with the pleasure principle. For instance, people often repeat past traumatic events for the sake of repression, i.e., to keep painful feelings unconscious. And yet, Freud concedes, there are instances in which people’s internal compulsion to repeat “overrides the pleasure principle.”
Far-Fetched Speculation: Arguments for the Death Instinct
Freud begins the fourth section of the book with these words: “What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.” He had previously believed that our mental processes are determined by the pleasure principle and the reality principle and that the reality principle in fact serves the pleasure principle. But in what follows he argues that some of our mental processes cannot be reduced to these principles and that in fact there is another existent principle or instinct. He provides three arguments for this new proposition, none of which I completely understand.
Argument #1: The dreams of individuals with traumatic neurosis. Earlier in the book Freud discussed individuals with a traumatic neurosis, noting that the nature of their dreams contradict his previous claim that a dream is an expression of one’s wishes. A traumatized individual’s dream is not an expression of his wishes but rather an attempt to master the traumatic event “by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.” Put differently, traumatized individuals develop a traumatic-neurosis because they experienced fight, not anxiety — fright occurring when someone is exposed to “danger without being prepared for it” and anxiety occurring when one anticipates danger. And so in his dreams, a traumatized person relives the event and in order to move from a state of fright (for which there is no protection) to a state of anxiety (for which one can prepare) and in so doing to gain a feeling of mastery of the traumatic event.
Freud brings all this together, and makes an argument which can be stated as follows: (1) Fright precedes anxiety; (2) When one has experienced fight (but not anxiety), his dreams are not guided by the pleasure principle; (3) Therefore, there is something that precedes the pleasure principle. I understand the logic of this argument but don’t understand the first premise, that fright precedes anxiety. Nonetheless, this is Freud’s argument, at least as I understand it, and if true, it proves to him that there is something “beyond the pleasure principle.”
Argument #2: The repetition compulsions occurring in analysis. Although Freud has argued that two types of repetitions are not incompatible with the pleasure principle (the repetitions found in the play of children and the repetitions found in our life decisions), he says that the repetition that occurs in the analytic transference “disregards the pleasure principle in every way.” He explains: “The patient behaves in a purely infantile fashion and thus shows us that the repressed memory-traces of his primeval experiences are not present in him in a bound state and are indeed in a sense incapable of obeying the secondary process.” I don’t quite understand his argument here.
Argument #3: Other forms of life appear to possess an instinctual urge to return to an earlier state. For example, certain fishes and birds often migrate to faraway places once inhabited by their ancestors. If we follow this argument to its natural conclusion, it follows that we ultimately long to die. The argument for this proposition can be stated as follows: (1) All living organisms ultimately long to return to their earlier states; (2) The earliest state for living organisms was pre-birth, being in an inanimate state; (3) Living organisms therefore desire to return to their inanimate state, which would obviously be death.
If we accept the above arguments, then we must concede the existence of what he calls the death instincts (or ego instincts). He believes that the death instincts are not our only instincts, as the sexual instincts work against them. “One group of instincts,” he writes, “rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.”
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