Beyond the Pleasure Principle

by Sigmund Freud

  However, we cannot help but feel a certain excitement when we discover that such a penetrating scientist as G. T. Fechner advocated an interpretation of pleasure and unpleasure that accords in all essential respects with the one so forcefully suggested to us by our psychoanalytic work. Fechner's statement on the matter is contained in his brief study Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwicklungs-geschichte der Organismen [Some Ideas on the Origin and Evolution of Organisms] of 1873 (Section XI, supplementary note, p. 94), and reads as follows: ‘Inasmuch as conscious impulses are always associated with pleasure or unpleasure, we may suppose that pleasure and unpleasure, too, are linked psycho-physically to conditions of stability and instability; and this gives grounds for a hypothesis that I shall develop in more detail elsewhere, namely that every psycho-physical motion that passes the threshold of consciousness involves pleasure to the degree that it moves beyond a certain point towards complete stability, and unpleasure to the degree that it moves beyond a certain point away from that stability; whilst between these two points – which may be defined as the qualitative thresholds of pleasure and unpleasure – there is a certain margin of aesthetic indifference…’

  The facts that have caused us to believe in the dominion of the pleasure principle within the psyche also inform our assumption that one aspiration of the psychic apparatus is to keep the quantity of excitation present within it at the lowest possible level, or at least to keep it constant. The latter postulate is the same as the former, albeit expressed in different terms, for if the psychic apparatus is geared to minimizing the quantity of excitation, then anything tending to increase that quantity is bound to be experienced as counter-functional, and hence unpleasurable. The pleasure principle arose out of the constancy principle; in reality, however, the constancy principle was inferred from the same facts that compelled us to postulate the pleasure principle. We shall also discover on deeper consideration that the particular aspiration we attribute to the psychic apparatus is subsumable as a special case under Fechner's principle of ‘the tendency to stability’, to which he linked the sensations of pleasure and unpleasure.

  That being so, however, we have to acknowledge that it is strictly speaking incorrect to say that the pleasure principle has dominion over the way in which psychic processes evolve. If this were the case, then the vast majority of our psychic processes would need to be accompanied by pleasure or lead to pleasure, whereas all common experience contradicts such a conclusion. The true situation, therefore, can only be that the pleasure principle exists as a strong tendency within the psyche, but is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot possibly always accord with the said tendency in favour of pleasure. Compare Fechner's remark in a similar context (op. cit., p. 90) that ‘the tendency to achieve a particular goal does not imply the actual achievement of that goal, and the goal may not be achievable at all except in approximate terms’. If we now turn to the question as to which circumstances are capable of preventing the pleasure principle from being carried into effect, we find ourselves back on safe and familiar ground, and in seeking an answer we are able to draw on a rich profusion of psychoanalytical experience.

  The primary example of the pleasure principle being thus inhibited is already familiar to us as a spontaneous and automatic process. We know that the pleasure principle belongs to a primary operational level of the psychic apparatus, and that so far as self-preservation is concerned it is never anything but useless, indeed highly dangerous, given the challenges posed by the external world. Thanks to the influence of the ego's self-preservation drive it is displaced by the reality principle,3 which, without abandoning the aim of ultimately achieving pleasure, none the less demands and procures the postponement of gratification, the rejection of sundry opportunities for such gratification, and the temporary toleration of unpleasure on the long and circuitous road to pleasure. This notwithstanding, the pleasure principle remains for a long period of time the vehicle of the much less ‘educable’ sexual drives, and there are countless occasions – be it on the basis of these latter drives, be it within the ego itself – where the pleasure principle overwhelms the reality principle, to the detriment of the entire organism.

  There is no doubt, however, that displacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle can be held responsible for only a very few experiences of unpleasure, and for none whatever of the most intense ones. Another source of unpleasure, no less spontaneous and automatic, arises from the conflicts and divisions that occur within the psychic apparatus during the course of the ego's development to more highly composite forms of organization.4 Almost all the energy that fills the psychic apparatus stems from its innate drive-impulses, but not all of these are granted access to the same phases of development. As things evolve, so there are numerous occasions where individual drives, or elements of individual drives, prove to be incompatible in their aims and demands with all those others that are capable of joining together to yield the all-embracing unity of the ego. They are therefore separated off from this unified whole through the process of repression; they are restricted to lower levels of psychic development and, for the time being at least, cut off from any possibility of gratification. If they subsequently manage by circuitous means to fight their way to some form of direct or surrogate gratification – as so easily happens in the case of repressed sexual drives – this success, which otherwise would have offered an opportunity for pleasure, is experienced by the ego as unpleasure. Because of the earlier conflict with its outcome in repression, the pleasure principle is once again confuted, right at the very time when various other drives are busy giving effect to it by occasioning new pleasure. The details of the process whereby repression converts an opportunity for pleasure into a source of unpleasure are not yet clearly understood, and cannot be described with any precision, but it is doubtless the case that all neurotic unpleasure is of this kind, that is to say, pleasure that cannot be experienced as such.5

  The two sources of unpleasure identified here by no means account for the majority of our experiences of unpleasure, but of the remainder one can say with some semblance of justification that their existence does not contradict the dominion of the pleasure principle. After all, most of the unpleasure that we feel is perceptual unpleasure, involving perception of the turbid pressure of ungratified inner drives, or perception of external things; this latter perception may be unpleasant in itself, or it may provoke unpleasurable expectations within the psychic apparatus, and hence be recognized by the latter as a ‘danger’. The reaction to these demands of the drives within and dangers posed from without – a reaction that manifests the proper activity of the psychic apparatus – may thus quite correctly be regarded as deriving from the pleasure principle or from its modifier,6 the reality principle. This being so, it might seem otiose to grant the existence of any further constraints upon the pleasure principle; yet it is precisely an investigation of the psyche's response to external dangers that affords new material and raises new questions concerning the problem at issue here.

  II

  A condition consequent upon severe mechanical shock, train crashes, and other life-threatening accidents has long since been identified and described – a condition that has come to be known as ‘traumatic neurosis’. The terrible war that has only just ended7 gave rise to a great many such disorders, and did at least put an end to the temptation to attribute them to organic impairment of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force.8 The clinical picture presented by traumatic neurosis is not unlike that of hysteria in its plethora of similar motor symptoms, but generally goes well beyond it in the very marked signs of subjective suffering that it displays – not unlike those in hypochondria or melancholia – and in the clear evidence it affords of a far more comprehensive and generalized enfeeblement and attrition of the individual's psychic capabilities. As yet, no one has managed to attain to a full understanding of either the neuroses of war or the traumatic neuroses of peacetime. In
the case of the war neuroses, it seemed on the one hand illuminating, yet simultaneously baffling, that the selfsame clinical picture occasionally arose without the involvement of any raw mechanical force. In the case of ordinary traumatic neurosis, two features stand out very clearly, and have proved a useful starting point for further thought: first, the fact that the key causative element appeared to lie in the surprise factor, the fright experienced by the victim; and second, the fact that if any physical wound or injury was suffered at the same time, this generally inhibited the development of the neurosis. The words ‘fright’, ‘dread’ and ‘fear’ are wrongly used as interchangeable synonyms, for they can be easily differentiated from each other in their relationship to danger.9 ‘Fear’ represents a certain kind of inner state amounting to expectation of, and preparation for, danger of some kind, even though the nature of the danger may well be unknown. ‘Dread’ requires a specific object of which we are afraid. ‘Fright’, however, emphasizes the element of surprise; it describes the state that possesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without being prepared for it. I do not believe that fear can engender a traumatic neurosis; there is an element within fear that protects us against fright, and hence also against fright-induced neurosis. We shall return to this proposition later on.

  The study of dreams may be regarded as the most reliable approach route for those seeking to understand the deep-level processes of the psyche. Now it is a distinctive feature of the dream-life of patients with traumatic neurosis that it repeatedly takes them back to the situation of their original misadventure, from which they awake with a renewed sense of fright. People have shown far too little surprise at this phenomenon. The fact that the traumatic experience repeatedly forces itself on the patient even during sleep is assumed to be proof indeed of just how deep an impression it made. The patient is assumed to be, so to speak, psychically fixated10 on the trauma. Such fixations on the experience that first triggered the illness have long been familiar to us in the context of hysteria. Breuer and Freud expressed the view in 1893 that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. In the case of war neuroses, too, observers such as Ferenczi and Simmel have been able to explain various motor symptoms as arising from a fixation on the moment of trauma.

  On the other hand, however, I am not aware that those suffering from traumatic neurosis are very much preoccupied in their waking life with memories of their misadventure. Perhaps, rather, they are at pains not to think of it. To take it for granted that night-time dreams automatically thrust them back into the situation that provoked their illness would be to misunderstand the nature of dreams. It would be rather more in the nature of dreams to conjure up pictures from the time when the patient was healthy, or else pictures of the return to health that is hoped for in the future. If the dreams of those with accident-induced neurosis are not to make us start doubting the wish-fulfilling tendency of dreams in general, then we might have recourse to the explanation that in this disorder the dream-function, like so much else, is thrown into disarray and distracted from its proper purposes; or we might have to turn our minds to the mysterious masochistic tendencies of the ego.11

  I should now like to suggest that we leave the dark and dismal topic of traumatic neurosis and study the workings of the psychic apparatus by reference to one of its earliest forms of normal activity. I mean the play of children.

  The various theories of children's play have only recently been collated and psychoanalytically evaluated by S[igmund] Pfeifer in Imago (vol. V, no. 4), and I would refer readers to this paper. These theories seek to divine the motive forces behind children's play, but they do so without paying sufficient attention to the economic perspective: the concern of the individual to gain pleasure. Without wishing to embrace the whole gamut of these phenomena, I took advantage of an opportunity that happened to present itself to me in order to elucidate a game played by a one-and-a-half-year-old boy, the first that he had ever invented for himself. It was more than a fleeting observation, as I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for several weeks, and it was quite some time before the puzzling and constantly repeated behaviour of the child yielded up its meaning to me.

  The child was by no means precocious in his intellectual development; at one and a half he spoke only a few intelligible words, and in addition had a small repertoire of expressive sounds comprehensible to those around him. But he had a good rapport with his parents and the family's one maid, and was praised for being a ‘good boy’. He didn't disturb his parents during the night; he conscientiously heeded injunctions not to touch certain things and not to enter certain rooms; above all, he never cried when his mother left him for hours at a time, even though he was fondly attached to her, she having not only fed him herself, but also cared for him and looked after him without any outside help. However, this good little boy had the sometimes irritating habit of flinging all the small objects he could get hold of far away from himself into a remote corner of the room, under a bed, etc., so that gathering up his toys was often no easy task. While doing this he beamed with an expression of interest and gratification, and uttered a loud, long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o’ sound, which in the unanimous opinion of both his mother and myself as observer was not simply an exclamation but stood for fort (‘gone’). I eventually realized that this was probably a game, and that the child was using all his toys for the sole purpose of playing ‘gone’ with them. Then one day I made an observation that confirmed my interpretation. The child had a wooden reel with some string tied around it. It never crossed his mind to drag it along the floor behind him, for instance, in other words to play toy cars with it; instead, keeping hold of the string, he very skilfully threw the reel over the edge of his curtained cot so that it disappeared inside, all the while making his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’ sound, then used the string to pull the reel out of the cot again, but this time greeting its reappearance with a joyful Da! (‘Here!’). That, then, was the entire game – disappearing and coming back – only the first act of which one normally got to see; and this first act was tirelessly repeated on its own, even though the greater pleasure undoubtedly attached to the second.12

  The interpretation of the game readily presented itself. It was associated with the child's immense cultural achievement in successfully abnegating his drives (that is, abnegating the gratification thereof) by allowing his mother to go away without his making a great fuss. He compensated for it, so to speak, by himself re-enacting this same disappearance–reappearance scenario with whatever objects fell to hand. So far as the affective evaluation of this game is concerned, it is of course immaterial whether the child invented it himself or adopted it in response to a cue from someone else. What interests us is a different point altogether. The going away of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor even a matter of indifference. How then does his repetition of this painful experience in his play fit in with the pleasure principle? One might wish to reply that the mother's departure would need to be reenacted in the game as the precondition of her happy return, and that this latter event was its real purpose. Such a view would be contradicted by the evident fact that Act One, the departure, was played as a game all on its own, indeed vastly more often than the full performance with its happy conclusion.

  The analysis of a single case such as this cannot resolve the issue with any certainty; but the impression gained by an unprejudiced observer is that the child had a different motive in turning the experience into a game. The experience affected him, but his own role in it was passive, and he therefore gave himself an active one by repeating it as a game, even though it had been unpleasurable. This endeavour could be attributed to an instinctive urge to assert control that operates quite independently of whether or not the memory as such was pleasurable. But we can also try another interpretation. The act of flinging away the object to make it ‘gone’ may be the gratification of an impulse on the child's part – which in the ordinary way of things remains suppressed – to take revenge
on his mother for having gone away from him; and it may thus be a defiant statement meaning ‘Alright, go away! I don't need you; I'm sending you away myself!’ This same child whose game I had observed when he was one and a half had the habit a year later of flinging down any toy that had made him cross and saying ‘Go in war!’ At the time he had been told that his absent father was away in the war, and he didn't miss his father in the least, instead giving out the clearest indications that he did not want his exclusive possession of his mother to be disrupted.13 We know from other children, too, that they are capable of expressing similar hostile impulses by flinging away objects in place of people.14 One accordingly begins to have one's doubts as to whether the urge to psychically process powerful experiences, to achieve full control over them, is capable of manifesting itself on a primary level, independently of the pleasure principle. After all, in the case discussed here the child may well only have been able to repeat an unpleasant experience in his play because the repetition was associated with a different but direct gain in pleasure.