Beyond the Pleasure Principle

by Sigmund Freud

  One might thus say that the Cs system has the particular distinguishing feature that excitation processes do not leave a mark in the form of an enduring alteration of its elements, as they do in all the other psychic systems, but simply evaporate, as it were, in the process of entering consciousness. Such a departure from the general rule can only be explained by some factor relevant solely to this one system, and this exclusive factor, not found in any of the other systems, could easily be the exposed location of the Cs system, its direct contiguity with the external world.

  Let us imagine living organisms in their simplest possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of irritable matter; its surface, inasmuch as it faces out towards the external world, is thus differentiated by its very position, and serves as the vesicle's receptor organ. Embryology qua recapitulation of evolution really does show, moreover, that the central nervous system develops from the ectoderm; and the grey cerebral cortex remains a derivative of the primordial outer surface, and may well have inherited some of its essential attributes. It is therefore easily conceivable that by dint of constant bombardment of the vesicle's outer surface by external stimuli, the substance of the cell becomes permanently altered down to a certain depth, with the result that excitation occurs differently in this surface layer from the way it occurs in the deeper layers. A cortex would thus form that ultimately becomes so tempered by the effect of the stimuli that it becomes perfectly adapted to their reception and becomes incapable of further modification. Applying this analogy to the Cs system, it would mean that the latter's elements cannot undergo any enduring change as a result of the excitation passing through it, since they are already modified to the fullest possible extent in terms of this particular process. But they do now have the capability to allow consciousness to come into being. What exactly constitutes this modification of both the matter itself and the excitation process taking place within it, is open to a variety of conjectures, none of which is currently susceptible of being properly tested. We can suppose that in passing from one element to the other the excitation has to overcome a resistance, and that it is precisely in dissipating this resistance that the excitation lays down an enduring trace (‘path-making’26); and we can further suppose that in the Cs system there no longer exists any such resistance to the transition from one element to another. We can link this notion to Breuer's distinction between quiescent (i.e. already annexed27) and free-moving cathectic energy within the elements of psychic systems;28 on this basis, the elements of the Cs system would not carry any energy that is already annexed, but only such as is readily available for release. But I rather think that for the time being it is better to speak of these things only in the most general terms. In speculating thus we have at least perhaps established some kind of connection between the origins of consciousness and both the location of the Cs system, and the particular characteristics of the excitation process that are attributable to that system.

  There are other matters that we still need to discuss with regard to the above-mentioned living vesicle with its stimulus-receiving cortical layer. This tiny piece of living matter floats around in an external world charged with energies of the most powerful kind, and would be destroyed by their stimulative effect if it were not equipped with some form of protection against stimulation. It acquires this protection by virtue of the fact that its outermost surface abandons the structure proper to living things, becomes to all intents and purposes inorganic, and in consequence operates as a special covering or membrane impeding the stimuli; that is to say, it allows only a fraction of the external energies’ intensity to pass through it to the layers immediately beyond, which remain fully organic. These latter, safe behind their protective screen, can now devote themselves to receiving the reduced levels of stimuli that are thus allowed through. The outer layer becomes necrotic – but by doing so it protects all the deeper-lying ones from suffering a similar fate, at any rate so long as the stimuli do not bombard it with such force that they break through the protective barrier. For the living organism, the process protecting it against stimuli is almost more important than the process whereby it receives stimuli; the protective barrier is equipped with its own store of energy, and must above all seek to defend the particular transformations of energy at work within it against the assimilative and hence destructive influence of the enormously powerful energies at work outside it. The process of receiving stimuli chiefly serves the purpose of determining the direction and nature of the external stimuli, and for that it must clearly be sufficient to take small specimens from the external world, to sample it in tiny quantities. In highly developed organisms the stimulus-receiving cortical layer of the erstwhile vesicle has long since retreated into the inner depths of the body, but parts of it have remained on the surface immediately beneath the general protective barrier. These are the sense organs, which essentially are equipped to register the effects of specific stimuli, but also include special devices to provide additional protection against excessively high levels of stimulation, and to exclude unsuitable types of stimulus. It is characteristic of them that they process only very small quantities of the external stimulus; they merely take samples of the external world. One can perhaps compare them to feelers that reach out tentatively towards the external world and then repeatedly draw back.

  At this point I shall venture to touch very briefly on a topic that would merit the most thorough consideration. As a result of certain insights afforded to us by psychoanalysis, Kant's dictum that time and space are necessary forms of human thought is today very much open to debate. We have come to appreciate that unconscious psychic processes are in themselves ‘timeless’. This primarily means that they are not temporally ordered; that time does not alter them in any way; and that the notion of time cannot be applied to them. These are negative attributes that we can only clearly discern by means of a comparison with conscious psychic processes. Indeed, our abstract notion of time seems to be altogether derived from the modus operandi of the Pcpt-Cs system, and to be equivalent to its perception of itself. Given that the system functions in this way, the protection process may well follow a quite different path. I realize that the ensuing propositions sound very obscure, but I must confine myself here to mere suggestions of this sort.

  We argued just now that the living vesicle is equipped with a barrier protecting it against stimuli in the external world. Prior to that we established that the cortical layer immediately beneath this barrier must be differentiated in such a way as to receive stimuli from the outside. However, this sensitive cortical layer, which later becomes the Cs system, also receives excitation from within. The location of this system between the outside and the inside, and the difference between the conditions determining the penetration achieved by the one side and those determining the penetration achieved by the other, become decisive for the performance of the system and indeed of the entire psychic apparatus. There is a protective barrier vis-à-vis the outside, so that any quanta of excitation arriving from that quarter can exert their effect only on a much reduced scale. But no such protection is possible vis-à-vis the inside: the excitations that come from the deeper layers carry over into the system directly and without diminution, whereby certain features of their mode of progression generate successive sensations of pleasure and/or unpleasure. It is true that, given their type of intensity and other qualitative characteristics (possibly also their amplitude), the excitations coming from within are going to be better suited to the modus operandi of the system than the barrage of stimuli coming from the external world. But two things are decisively determined by these circumstances; first, the fact that the sensations of pleasure and unpleasure – which are an index of processes going on within the psychic apparatus – take precedence over all external stimuli; second, a response-pattern tending to counter those inner excitations that bring about an excessive increase in unpleasure. A tendency inevitably emerges to treat them as if they came from without rather than from within, in order to be able to deploy
the protective barrier's defensive capabilities against them. This is the origin of projection, which plays such a major role in the causation of pathological processes.

  I have the sense that while these latter reflections may have given us a clearer understanding of the dominant role of the pleasure principle, we have not managed to cast any light on those cases that defy it. Let us therefore go a step further. We may use the term traumatic to describe those excitations from outside that are strong enough to break through the protective barrier; in my view the notion of ‘trauma’ cries out to be applied to such a case given that the resistance to stimuli is normally so effective. An event such as external trauma will doubtless provoke a massive disturbance in the organism's energy system, and mobilize all available defence mechanisms. In the process, however, the pleasure principle is put into abeyance. It is no longer possible to prevent the psychic apparatus from being flooded by large quanta of stimulation; instead a quite different challenge presents itself: to assert control over the stimuli; to psychically annex the quanta of stimulation that have burst in, and then proceed to dispose of them.

  The specific unpleasure of the physical pain experienced probably results from the fact that the protective barrier has been penetrated over a very small area. From this one point on the periphery a continuous stream of excitations floods into the central apparatus of the psyche, such as can normally come only from within the apparatus itself.29 And how can we expect the psyche to react to this invasion? Cathectic energy is summoned up from all sides in order to create appropriately large cathexes in the area where the breach occurred. A massive ‘counter-cathexis’ is brought into being, for the sake of which all the other psychic systems are deprived of their energy, with the result that general psychic activity is extensively paralysed or diminished. We aim to learn from such examples, we aim to use them as models on which to base our metapsychological suppositions. We therefore conclude from this particular response-pattern that a system that is itself highly cathected is capable of taking in a whole stream of new energy and converting it into quiescent cathexis, thus psychically ‘annexing’ it. The more powerful the system's own quiescent cathexis, the greater its annexative power would seem to be; and conversely, the less powerful the cathexis, the less the system is going to be capable of taking in a stream of energy from outside, and the more violent the consequences of such a breach of the protective barrier must necessarily be. It would not be a valid objection to this hypothesis to argue that the increase in cathexis around the point of entry could far more easily be explained in terms of a direct dispersal of the incoming quanta of excitation. If that were the case, then of course the psychic apparatus would simply experience an increase in its energy-cathexes, and both the paralysing nature of the pain and the depletion of all the other systems would remain unexplained. The very powerful release effects of pain do not detract from our explanation either, for they occur reflexively, that is to say, they happen without any prompting from the psychic apparatus.

  Needless to say, the haziness of all these deliberations of ours, which we term metapsychological, derives from the fact that we know absolutely nothing about the nature of the excitation process within the elements of the various psychic systems, and do not feel justified in forming any hypothesis on the matter; we thus constantly operate with a massive unknown quantity ‘x’, which we carry with us into every new formula that we propose. It is reasonable to assume that this process takes place with energies that differ quantitatively from each other, and it seems probable that there are also qualitative differences (for instance in the type of a given amplitude). A new possibility that we have taken into consideration is Breuer's proposition that two kinds of energy charge are involved, such that a distinction may be drawn between two different forms of cathexis of the psychic systems (or their elements): a quiescent form, and one that is free-flowing and constantly pressing for release. We might reasonably suspect that the ‘annexing’ of the energy flooding into the psychic apparatus consists in its being transferred from the free-flowing to the quiescent state.

  I believe we can reasonably venture to regard ordinary traumatic neurosis as resulting from an extensive breach of the protective barrier. This would appear to reinstate the old, naïve ‘shock’ theory, seemingly at the expense of a later and psychologically more sophisticated one that sees the key aetiological factor not in the direct impact of the mechanical violence itself, but in the element of fright and in the threat to life. These contrasting perspectives are not irreconcilable, however, and the psychoanalytic view of traumatic neurosis is not identical to the shock theory in its crudest form. Whereas for the latter the essential thing about the shock is that it directly damages the molecular or even the histological structure of the nerve elements, we for our part seek to understand its effects in terms of the breaching of the protective barrier around the psyche, and the new challenges that this gives rise to. For us, too, fright remains an important factor. Fright can occur only in the absence of a state of apprehensiveness,30 a state that would bring with it a hypercathexis of the systems that initially receive the extra stimulation. Because of the lower level of cathexis that this absence entails, the systems are not adequately primed to annex the quanta of excitation that now supervene, and so the consequences of the breaching of the protective barrier make themselves felt that much more easily. We thus find that apprehensiveness, together with the attendant hypercathexis of the receiving systems, constitutes the last line of defence of the protective barrier. Across quite a broad range of traumas, the outcome may well depend on whether the relevant systems are primed (by virtue of hypercathexis) or unprimed; though this factor is probably no longer of any importance once the trauma has reached a certain level of intensity. Under the dominion of the pleasure principle, it is the function of dreams to make a reality of wish-fulfilment, albeit on a hallucinatory basis; but the purposes of wish-fulfilment are certainly not being served by the dreams of patients with accident-induced neurosis when they thrust them back – as they so regularly do – into the original trauma situation. We may reasonably assume, however, that such dreams are thereby contributing to a quite different task that has to be completed before the pleasure principle can begin to prevail. These dreams seek to assert control over the stimuli retrospectively by generating fear – the absence of which was the cause of the traumatic neurosis in the first place. They thus afford us a clear view of a function of the psyche which, without contradicting the pleasure principle, is none the less independent of it, and appears to be more primal than the objective of gaining pleasure and avoiding unpleasure.

  This might be an appropriate point, therefore, to acknowledge for the first time that there is an exception to the proposition that dreams are a form of wish-fulfilment. Fear-based dreams31 do not constitute such an exception, as I have repeatedly and exhaustively demonstrated, and nor do ‘punishment dreams’, for these simply replace the forbidden wish-fulfilment with the punishment appropriate to it, and thus represent the wish-fulfilment of the individual's guilty conscience in its reaction to the drive that has been rejected. But the above-mentioned dreams of patients with accident-induced neurosis can no longer be viewed in terms of wish-fulfilment, and nor can those dreams, familiar to us from psychoanalysis, that bring back memories of the psychic traumas of childhood. Instead they obey the compulsion to repeat, though of course this is reinforced in analysis by the wish – itself strongly encouraged by ‘suggestion’ – to summon up all that has been forgotten and repressed. We might therefore also suppose that it was not the original function of dreams to dispel the forces tending to interrupt sleep by fulfilling the wishes of the impulses causing the disruption; dreams were able to acquire this function only after the entire psyche had accepted the dominion of the pleasure principle. If there is indeed a prior realm ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, then it is only logical to allow that there must likewise have been a prior era before dreams developed their predisposition to wish-fulfilment. This is n
ot to gainsay their subsequent function. But as soon as we accept that this predisposition is capable of being breached, a further question arises: dreams such as these that enact the compulsion to repeat in furtherance of the psychic annexing of traumatic experiences – can they not also occur outside analysis? The answer to this question is emphatically ‘yes’.

  With regard to ‘war neuroses’, in so far as this term signifies more than simply a reference to the circumstances in which the condition arose, I have already argued elsewhere that they could very well be traumatic neuroses facilitated by an ego conflict.32 The aforementioned fact that the chances of a neurosis arising are less when the trauma simultaneously causes a gross physical injury (see above, p. 50) no longer seems incomprehensible when we bear in mind two circumstances highlighted by psychoanalytic research: first, the fact that mechanical jolts and vibrations have to be acknowledged as one of the sources of sexual excitation (cf. the remarks on the effects of swings and of railway travel in Three Essays on Sexual Theory, 1905); and second, the fact that throughout their duration, painful and feverish illnesses exert a powerful effect on the distribution of the libido. Thus it may well be the case that while the mechanical violence of the trauma unleashes a quantum of sexual excitation which in the absence of a state of apprehensiveness is potentially traumatic in its effect, the simultaneous physical injury annexes the excessive excitation by making use of a narcissistic hypercathexis of the affected organ (see On the Introduction of Narcissism, p. 11). It is also a well-known fact though one insufficiently taken into account in the development of the libido theory that even such severe disruption of libido distribution as occurs in melancholia is put into abeyance by intercurrent organic illness; indeed, under the same conditions even a fully developed dementia praecox is capable of temporary regression.